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From: CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET (Christopher Tate)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Drilling holes in DS/DD -> DS/HD
Message-ID: <89347.194237CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET>
Date: 14 Dec 89 00:42:37 GMT
References: <16918215MES@MSU>
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 28

In article <16918215MES@MSU>, <18215MES@MSU.BITNET> says:

>A student friend of mine said that a buddy of his drilled a hole
>in his DS/DD 3.5" floppy to convert it to a High Density disk,
>and IT WORKED! I know this is probably not advisable, but
>is this the same trick they played on us with the 400 k disks -
>some of which worked fine formatted to 800k? (also risky I guess)
>Has Anyone else tried this? (those DS/HD are still pretty expensive)

Sure, this will work, but dollars to doughnuts says that you'll get a lot
more than your share of disk crashes on the modified disks.  The medium on
the 800K disks simply isn't designed to maintain that high a density of
magnetic polarity changes.

I've heard that once double-sided disks became commonplace, the single-sided
disks were just the ones that didn't pass factory inspection on one side.
I wonder if the same principle applies (or will someday apply) to 800K disks
as compared with 1.4M disks....

On the other hand, probably not, since the 1.4M medium is presumably harder
to manufacture, and therefore more expensive.

-------
Christopher Tate                        |   "Oh wow:  not only is 57
                                        |    prime, but it's also
Bitnet: cxt105@psuvm                    |    divisible by three!"
Uucp: ...!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!cxt105   |
Internet: cxt105@psuvm.psu.edu          |    - a very sincere math major