Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!gatech!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!iuvax!bobmon From: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Bob...Mon) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: There's a hole in my floppy, dear Liza, dear Liza Message-ID: <6185@iuvax.UUCP> Date: 16 Feb 88 03:03:05 GMT References: <3037@cup.portal.com> <3186@cup.portal.com> <9544@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <19907@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Bob...Mon) Organization: Schizophrenics `R` Us Lines: 32 Summary: TWO Holes!!!!!!!! iraq!halvers@steinmetz.UUCP (peter c halverson) writes: - I took a look at my software - collection, and *every* *single* *disk* has a hole in it. - [...] - Has anyone else noticed this, or is there something wrong with all - of my disks? Could this have anything to do with these "virus" programs - that I keep hearing about? Then madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost) writes: - There are two forms of diskette, those with one hole in them and those - with many. Diskettes with many holes are "hard sectored", meaning - that each hole indicates the start of a sector. Most drives now use - diskettes with only one hole, which indicates the first sector of the - track. Some drives don't use the hole at all -- Apple 5.25" and - Commodore 1541/1571 drives are examples of these. I'm afraid you're both wrong. Most 5.25" disks have _two_ holes in them; a nice big one in the middle, which peter noticed, and a smaller, more modest one that Jim caught on to. I can personally attest that the Commodore 1541 drive ignores the absence of the little hole, from which I conclude that it would also ignore the presence of the little hole. The only time it ever ignored the BIG hole, though, the disk became unusable thereafter. This may have been the work of one of those viruses that peter fears -- in my experience disks _without_ that big hole in the center have been fairly immune to malicious disk writes. p.s. :) -- RAMontante bobmon@iuvax.indiana.cs.edu Computer Science Department If you listen to Tools... Indiana University the Slide Rules!