[Duo2400] OT: 800K floppies

[David Linker]

It has been a while, but my recollection is that there is an open hole 
on one of the corners of the 1.4 MB floppy. If you cover this hole with 
tape, the drive will think that it is an 800K floppy, and you can 
reformat it in that size.

NOTE: If your reformat, you will lose all data on the floppy. If you 
cover the hole, and do not reformat, it will be unreadable.

This trick also works if you have accidentally formatted a 1.4 MB 
floppy in a drive that only knows about 800K, and then transfer it to 
one that knows about 1.4 MB. Covering the hole allows it to be read 
properly.

As an aside, this was used as an argument to try to convince a 
colleague of mine to get rid of all of his macs. When there was the 
change to 1.4 MB, his technical support told him that apple had changed 
the floppy format so that all previously formatted floppies would be 
unreadable in future machines, and that this "instability" of the 
platform was a reason to switch. In fact, the lab had been using 1.4 MB 
floppies in 800K drives, so that when the new drives came out they were 
told that they were "unreadable". A piece of tape fixed the problem.

DTL


On Sunday, May 18, 2003, at 06:26 AM, Marcelus G. Zalotti wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> Does anyone of you know how to "convert" a 1.4MB floppy into a 800K 
> one?
>
>
>
>