Greetings ( + )!( + ) On Jul 29, 2005, at 12:46 PM, Michele Forrester wrote:
Some of the OLDER floppies, even if they are the 1.44 MB (or whatever is the current) will not read in OS 9. I had some games, etc. from the early 90's and they would read and play on my son's iMac that was 8.6 but once we went to 9 they were just gone/invisible.
I'm not up to date on the current floppy drives, but the original drives would format more capacity than the stated capacity of the floppy drive. I don't remember for sure (but someone will probably correct me) however the 800k floppy would format at around 920k (it required a special init program to use the extra capacity.) The reason was that the floppy when used would write data to the extra tracks during the write/verify process if the data was corrupt.
Some of the manufactures found out that they could write information on these extra tracks and during the loading process they would refer the loading process to read data from the extra tracks. This was one of the reasons that you could not copy floppy disk and expect them to work. i.e. the copy program would only read the formatted 800k capacity of the disk.
This extra capacity could be used if you had a special init that would allow you to format all of the tracks for use and then use them. The big risk was that if your disk developed bad sectors you would loose data.
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