Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!comp.vuw.ac.nz!massey!M.Jones
From: M.Jones@massey.ac.nz (Michael Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Formatting question (too good to be true)
Message-ID: <213cs-sunb@massey.ac.nz>
Date: 19 Jan 90 01:57:44 GMT
References: <4871@emory.mathcs.emory.edu> <JACOBS.90Jan13161956@cmos.cs.utah.edu>
Reply-To: M.Jones@massey.ac.nz
Organization: School of Information Sciences, Massey Univ, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Lines: 23

In article <JACOBS.90Jan13161956@cmos.cs.utah.edu> jacobs@cs.utah.edu (Steven R. Jacobs) writes:
>  [....stuff deleted....]
>The answer is 2).  Some brands of DS/DD disks will format just fine at
>1.2M.  Other brands will format, but give _lots_ of bad tracks.
>
>The real question is:  How reliable will these disks be when you go
>to read data from them 6 months from now?  Who knows.  I wouldn't
>recommend cramming too much data on floppies that were not designed
>for the higher capacity.

Yes, I've formatted a DS/DD disk to 1.2MB and tried to retrieve data
from it over a year later, and yes, I did lose quit a bit of the data
from bad tracks that weren't bad a year earlier. It's not to be
recommended! (Spend the extra $1 on a HD disk to ensure that your data
is safe.)

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