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From: pes@bath63.UUCP (Paul Smee)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16
Subject: Re: floppies a la 410 k per side
Message-ID: <254@bath63.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Nov-86 13:04:40 EST
Article-I.D.: bath63.254
Posted: Wed Nov  5 13:04:40 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Nov-86 22:03:04 EST
References: <3504@utcsri.UUCP>
Reply-To: pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Distribution: net
Organization: AUCC c/o University of Bath
Lines: 24
Keywords: *** IMPORTANT WARNING ***


Maybe someone's said it before, though I've been watching a lot longer
than i've been talking and haven't seen it.  I am using 'over-formatted'
disks for bulk storage of some things.  However there is one short-coming
which people should be aware of.  Some programs think they know what a
disk looks like and will not work on, or with, nonstandard disks.

    ******* IN PARTICULAR *******

The desktop 'whole disk copy' (move disk icon A over disk icon B) will
**NOT** properly copy a whole 410K disk onto another 410K disk.  It
*looks* like it is working, but in fact only 9 sectors per track get
copied over.  The 10th on the target disk is left containing the trash
pattern put in by the formatter.  (This is definitely true with the
version of ROM TOS which I've got.  If other people don't have this
problem, you're lucky.  At least check first, before counting on this.)

I suspect that the 'whole disk copy' also only knows about 80 tracks per disk
and that it will therefore do the wrong thing with 82 track 9sector disks,
but I haven't checked that.

File-by-file copies appear to work fine -- though I confess I now do a
compare between source and target files before trusting the result as
backup.