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From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: SE question
Message-ID: <560@crash.cts.com>
Date: 20 Oct 89 02:16:33 GMT
Sender: root@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 32

tempest@wet.UUCP (Ken Lui) writes:
>It's interesting that you brought this subject up because a
>friend of mine has an IBM PC, and is using a program that
>reformats DS/DD disks to 800K and (either 1.2Mb diskettes --> 1.44Mb
>or 1.44Mb diskettes --> 1.6Mb).  So, it's possible to get the
>extra capacity with just fixed-speed drives.  Given this
>situation, is there a program or is it possible to patch the
>MacOS to give us increased storage capacity?
 
I'm very familiar with this IBM compatable utilities to get extra capacity out
of certain floppies (720K DS/DD 3.5", et. al.).  What these programs do is
simple.  They add an extra track to the disk.  It is NOT recommended that
these utilities be used since they use 'questionable' areas of the disk to
plop down that extra track.  It might work from your experience, but I won't
use it because there's no guarrantee that it will work 100% of the time.  Will
it work under VP/ix (aka DOSMerge or a DOS window) under a *nix based OS? 
Probably not.  I'm not willing to make such a gamble with my data since I do
read DOS file systems on *nix based OS'es via VP/ix.  I know that they have
problems formatting.  At least the Sun 386i/250 at work refuses to format my
3.5" disks that will format perfectly on my AT (and conversely read and write
perfectly on the 386i) at home.

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