Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!agate!web-2b!laba-4ad
From: laba-4ad@web-2b.berkeley.edu (Joseph Teo)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FDHD problem?
Message-ID: <1990Jan16.223758.20087@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 16 Jan 90 22:37:58 GMT
References: <341@cvbnet.Prime.COM> <870287@hpcilzb.HP.COM>
Sender: Calvin Cheng
Reply-To: laba-4ad@web-2b (Joseph Teo)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 23

In article <870287@hpcilzb.HP.COM> mark@hpcilzb.HP.COM (Mark Turner) writes:
>I've been having similar problems with my SE/30.  I think the
>"superdrive" is a piece of shit.  I've blown away several very expensive
>HD disks, and lost some important files doing it.  Yesterday it spewed
>out what _had_ been a perfectly good 800k disk.  The usual message is:
>"The file ...  could not be written and was skipped (disk error)."
>Once this happens, you might as well throw the disk away, because you'll
>never be able to format it again.  Even after I erased the disk with a
>demagnetizer, it still wouldn't format.
>

I've been having a lot of problems with my FDHD too. I've been using a IIGS
for about 2 1/2 years until I switched over to the SE/30 about 6 months ago.
A lot of my Apple II disks which I intended to reuse on the Mac became
unreadable. Certainly a great deal more than the normal attrition rate.
Everything seemed to die right away. I haven't got a single 3.5" disk
failure until that stage for that matter.

To be fair, a lot of my friends using the IIGS started to experience problems
with their disks too. And I think the problem is more because of the 
difference between DD and HD disk formatting rather than Apple and IBM
formats. The Mac also seemed to be a great deal more fuzzy about the
condition of the disks than the Apple II.