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Low Density floppies

A

atari2600a

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May 26, 2006
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After hours upon hours of transferring files from the Internet to CD to Hard Disk to Floppy (& for the System One image, to another floppy)& with alot of help from Thrashbarg, I finally got System 1.1 running on my Plus...once...(& after ALOT of Trial & Error)

I did the 'ol tape trick to format my only TDK-brand floppy to 400K, as it's the only floppy which worked (my Maxells didn't work). I was able to write System 1.1 to it.

My SE just plain refused to read the disk, & the Plus read it after the 3rd try, & then never worked again.


Does anyone know of a brand of floppies still being sold that works well w/ the tape trick? (I know it's a longshot, but I should at least ask...) Tomorrow (well, Today, as it's 2:47AM as of press time) I plan on going to buy some floppies so I can install System 7.5.3 on my LCII & 6.0.8 on my SE, & plus I still need to write some floppies for SirPaul, so maybe I can grab some LD floppies at the Surplus if I see any, but those chances are slim...
 
So you're using 1.44MB HD floppies as single-sided 360-400K DD floppies? While you may not be able to find any NOS 3.5" DD in a store, maybe you should look for any Atari ST or Amiga usergroups in your neighbourhood. It is likely that someone has a small supply of surplus floppies for you to trade, and you don't have to keep track of which HD floppies work better or worse while masquerading as DD.
 
Also, the floppy disk manufacturer Athana which has been plugged a lot recently, also has 3.5" DD in their sortiment, either unformatted, IBM formatted or Macintosh formatted. I can't recall the minimum order size though.
 
Well I grabbed the only brand of floppies Best Buy (a large electronics retailer here in the US) carried, Fujifilm brand. I didn't have time to go to the surplus today, I might be able to go there on Sunday to see if they have any DD floppies, but I kinda doubt it...

The drive heads on the Macintosh Plus could read & write to the FujiFilm floppy flawlessly, but the SE's heads can't read it at all. I have my Plus booted into System 1.1, so I'll take some pictures & add it to my site tomorrow.

I was considering eBay, but would I really want to pay for floppies that may or may not work? I'd rather take my luck w/ whatever floppies I can find locally than ones off eBay.
 
Working with older disk images

Working with older disk images

a 400k disk use MFS macintosh file system

use disk copy 4.2 on a mac system running system 6
(system 6 can read/write 400k disks)
a great machine doing this is the macintosh IIci
easy to setup an ethernet network

with a two partitions on HD
one with system 6, on with system 7

http://homepage.mac.com/chinesemac/earlymacs/disk_images.html
 
Disk Copy 6.6 seems to be writing the images perfectly on my LCII w/ System 7.1. (I still need to write those 19 System 7.5.3 images)

The other day on IRC I was messing w/ the idea that maybe if I wrote the images on my Plus instead of the LCII, maybe the magnetic data would be thick enough for the SE's heads to pick up. But I have no hard disk for my Plus, so I can't attempt it (heck, if I had a hard disk, I'd have it running on 6.0.8!)

I finally took some images of my Mac Plus in System 1.1
http://mtac.profusehost.net/macplus/macplus.shtml
 
system 1.1 isn't recommended for the mac plus
also not for the macintosh 128 or 512 k
 
Some local Amiga usergroup should be able to get you used DD disks cheap enough, I used to get mine in bulk but the company I purchased them from jacked the price way up to $60 for 500 plus shipping (they are heavy).

One of the old compacts had the OS built into its ROM, don't recall which one it was.
 
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