Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!milton!amigo
From: amigo@milton.acs.washington.edu (Michael Robertson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: HD floppies
Message-ID: <2336@milton.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 10 Mar 90 05:34:43 GMT
References: <1205@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
Reply-To: amigo@milton.acs.washington.edu (Michael Robertson)
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 29

In article <1205@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips) writes:
>In <90065.140254JAM160@psuvm.psu.edu>, JAM160@psuvm.psu.edu (James MacKenzie) writes:
>>
>>Sorry, Tom, but there is NO difference in the magnetic media of HD and DD
>>3-1/2" disks...in fact, you can take a DD 3-1/2" disk and put a hole in
>>it where the extra one is on a HD, and it will work.
>
>Going that direction is a little more reliable than going the other direction.
>
>Tell you what. You buy a HD floppy diskette. Format it on your Amiga. put your
>normal boot stuff on it.  Use it if it holds the data at all.  Tell me how long
>it goes before you have a munged, unusable boot disk.  Tell me why.
>
 
	I have a few 3.5 HD disks around, found they aren't very usuable
in Commodore's stock drives (the internal), but my external which is a
Toshiba, treats these as any other 3.5" disk. I have had NO problem with
it working on that drive, but like I said, the drives Commodore
uses on the internal (Mitsumi or something like that) won't read it
AT ALL.
        I think it has to do with the quality of the mechanisms, and
things like how the head reads the disk. Being as the HD disks are actually
using a different type of coating - this is similar to the variations
in cassette tapes. There's Ferric, Chrome, and Metal cassettes, in the
disk world though, they're something different of course. Anyhow, its
the variation that causes it to not read right on the internal, the
external I figure uses the same head as a HD drive, so therefore it reads/writes just fine.