Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!cbosgd!mandrill!neoucom!wtm From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: High density drive in AT (not quad) Message-ID: <908@neoucom.UUCP> Date: 4 Jan 88 04:37:10 GMT References: <435@doug.UUCP> <63200021@convexe> Sender: red@neoucom.UUCP Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Lines: 20 Summary: HD diskette megnetic coercivity <> HD diskettes can not be written upon in either a 360K or a quad density drive. This is because the magnetic material used in HD disks requires a much stronger magnetic field to write. The heads in standard drives don't have enough field strength to work. A brand new double density floppy may be formatted and written in an HD drive. They can probably be read in a 360K drive, but if you mix and mach by writing with but drive types on the same diskette, you will almost certainly eventually get read errors due to differing track widtch used and alignment skew on 360K drives. There are some software packages advertised that claim to enable an HD drive to successfully format and write in interchangable 360K format. They do this by recording the same data track 4 times in the HD drive. I haven't tried any of these programs, so you are on your own... --Bill