Re: 1100FD & 1.44 3.5" disks

thewises wrote:
dgriffi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Griffith) wrote in
Have you tried taping over the HD hole on a 1.44 floppy? It's not supposed to work, but it sometimes does.


Don't do it. HD floppies are coated with different material than DD floppies are, and DD drives don't have enough current to read them. Disks formatted this way won't last long. Look on Ebay. They always have plenty of brand-new DD 3.5" disks.

Your statement is misleading, it does work (for 3.5", using HD media as DD) and there is no problem over time so far, the difference in coating is very small. BTW The current you are mentioning is applied when writing, not reading.

So do it if it is necessary, for testing or whatever. The tape should typically be under the disk as the drive is sensing mechanically from below.

It is not as if the real thing would always work and last forever.

The only thing that will keep your data from rotting away is to have backups.

On the other hand, I have bought DD floppies for use with my TRS-80s, because it is more convenient and should work better (in theory). I even bought them from computernews80, and recommend you to do the same.

What shouldn't be done is the opposite, to drill a hole in a DD sleeve to use it as a HD. This would often give problems with formatting and later fading. Note: This wouldn't be typical today but back when HD was much more expensive than DD.

Note also that this applies only to 3.5". 5.25" have a big difference between DD and HD media. Though formating DSDD 48TPI media with 80 track seems to be no problem while DSDD 96TPI is what it should have been. DSDD 96TPI is very unusual as it was not typically used on PC's (360K is DSDD 48TPI and 1.2M is DSHD 96TPI.

Knut
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