High density disks on double density drives

From: Marvin <marvin_at_rain.org>
Date: Sat Sep 19 23:17:57 1998

Jason Willgruber wrote:
>
> In PC's, I always use 1.44 meg disks in 720k drives. I just tape over the
> second hole, and format them in one of my 720k machines. I have one of

Going from memory, the orstead rating for 360K diskettes is 300, 1.2M is
600, 720K is 600, and 1.4MB is 700. As such, the difference between 720K
and 1.44 MB is marginal but will still work. It is more common to take the
720K diskettes and punch a new hole in them to use them as 1.44. As you can
see though, the difference between 360K and 1.2 MB is much greater, and at
best is not reliable. There have been many discussions about this over the
past 15 years or so.

Another area of controversy is using 360K disks to transfer information
between 1.2 and 360 drives. Nutshell description: if the diskette has been
bulk erased and formatted and information written by the 1.2 (of course
using the /4 or f:360 switch), it will work fine. Once a disk has been
written to by the 360K disk, writting to it again with the 1.2 can
frequently result in an unreadable disk on a 360 drive.
Received on Sat Sep 19 1998 - 23:17:57 BST