Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!ncar!porter!schabtac
From: schabtac@porter.uucp (Adam Schabtach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Drilling holes in DS/DD -> DS/HD
Message-ID: <5678@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 13 Dec 89 23:41:16 GMT
References: <16918215MES@MSU> <5912@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@ncar.ucar.edu
Reply-To: schabtac@porter.UCAR.EDU (Adam Schabtach)
Organization: Field Observing Facility, NCAR, Boulder, CO
Lines: 34

In article <5912@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> ar4@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Piper Keairnes) writes:
>In article <16918215MES@MSU> you write:                                    
>>A student friend of mine said that a buddy of his drilled a hole        
>>in his DS/DD 3.5" floppy to convert it to a High Density disk,         
>>and IT WORKED! I know this is probably not advisable, but
>> [ . . . ]
>                                     
>  I know a few people that REGULARLY format 800k disks to HD format. They
>don't drill the hole, they use a soldering iron. This decreases the amount
>of loose material floating around inside the disk. [ . . . ]

This reminds me of the good ol' days of the Apple ][ (remember it? no mouse,
no windows, upper-case only display, but hey, it had slots and color :-),
when we would make 5.25" floppies into "flippies" by punching a notch on the
edge opposite the write-protect notch, creating a double-sided floppy. 'Course
you had to flip them over by hand; hence the name.

But back to the topic at hand:  I knew a guy who went one step further, and
put a switch on the front of his disk drive that allowed him to defeat the
microswitch inside that "felt" the write-protect notch.  That way, he didn't
have to punch notches in his disk -- he'd just flip the switch, and the
drive would merrily write onto a write-protected disk, or onto the back of
an upside-down disk.

Well, now, things are different, but a notch is a notch, and I see no reason
why one couldn't perform a similar modification on a newfangled 3.5" drive.
It might be more aesthetically pleasing to put the switch on the inside of
the case somewhere, rather than drilling the front of your Mac II chassis.

Naturally it would void your warranty, but 90 days goes by pretty quickly...

No, I haven't tried it, but I might, once Santa brings me my new machine.
--Adam                    *  *  *  KILL YOUR TELEVISION  *  *  *      
schabtac@stout.ucar.edu