begin Tony Alfrey's quote: | After further quizzing, the floppy seems to be about 8 years old, | but . . . | it says "Sony High Density MFD-2HD". I have some old 720k | macintosh disks that say MFD-2DD ( "double density" ). It | certainly acts like 720k (which my box also cannot open or | transfer). Maybe it was formatted at 720 k. Any magic tricks in | this case?
well, it's definitely a disk designed for 1.44 then (a quick trick to determine it, even without labels, is to look at the number of holes in the top. if there's the write-protection one plus one on the other side, it's 1.44; if there's just the wrote-protection hole, it's 720). however . . . there were people who sold hole punches to "convert" 720s to 1.44s, back when floppies were pretty expensive. however . . . they often -- usually -- didn't work. oh, they made the hole, no problem there, but the diskette probably never worked. added to . . . the claim of compatibility. the dd/hd problem was not as gruesome as that in the 360k/1.2m 5.25 drive changeover, but it was pretty bad anyway. if memory serves, it was usually possible to read a 720 in a 1.44 drive, but even this was not guaranteed. anything else was pushing it. and if a 1.44 was formetted to 720, reading it *would* be a problem, though perhaps possible in the drive that wrote it. on top of that, there is the matter of floppy data retention over time. i have floppies written in the mid-1980s that i can still read with no problem, and others from the same batch that are horribly corrupted. i don't suppose that you have anything like a dos machine with the nice old dos norton utilities on it . . . this would let you take a good look at the floppy and yank off anything that's there. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
