Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!samsung!dali!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!cxt105 From: CXT105@psuvm.psu.edu (Christopher Tate) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: it's the little things that annoy me Summary: If you cannot stand the spoon upright, the coffee is too weak. Message-ID: <90097.131238CXT105@psuvm.psu.edu> Date: 7 Apr 90 17:12:38 GMT References: <52048@coherent.coherent.com> Reply-To: cxt105@psuvm.psu.edu Organization: Penn State University Lines: 34 In article <52048@coherent.coherent.com>, dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) says: > [ lots of good stuff about the care and feeding of floppy disks ] > >7) Improper use of high-density floppies. If you format a HD floppy in > an 800k drive, you may never be able to use it properly in a > Superdrive... it won't reformat in high-density mode properly, and > (even it it does) you may find it unreliable. (I'm told that this is > the case, but I haven't experienced it myself as I don't have a > Superdrive). > >I've seen all of these syndromes except for #7... but I've never seen any >one of them at all frequently. While I've never seen the particular behavior you describe here, I am generally unimpressed by the behaviour of the FDHD drives. One day, I tried to format a stack of HD disks in an SE that had these drives. Out of five disks, I eventually got *one* of them to format, I think on the fourth try. There seems to be a historical difficulty with Macintosh disk drives -- they generally have a hard time formatting disks. The student microcomputer lab attendants here at Penn State have come up with a standard practice for dealing with disks that fail to initialize (in old-style drives): format them in an IBM PS/2 first, then try again. It works pretty well.... Am I deluded, or do the Macs have weaker magnetic fields when they write to their disks than other computers? It would certainly seem that way.... ------- Christopher Tate | | "Idle lawyers tend to become politicians, cxt105@psuvm.psu.edu | so there is a certain social value {...}!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!cxt105 | in keeping them busy." cxt105@psuvm.bitnet |