Recycled 5 1/4 Floppy drives

[us...@domain.invalid]

I have some old PC 5 1/4 floppy disks that I tried to use in my Kaypro 2
CP/M system. Using the MFDISK utility I formatted at Double Density
Single Sided. All three floppies formated ok and no errors where reported.

When I tried to use the floppies to create a new system disk (SYSGEN)
it clunked along for a while and then erorr'd out. Tried another disk
and got the same think. I then tried my third and final disk and just
PIP'd files to it. It also got errors!

Can previously formated disks on a PC work on the old 191K floppy
drives? I would think that a successful format would 'clean' them up
for use.

What are your thoughts?

[Larry Sonderling]

You might want to bulk erase them.

--Larry

<us...@domain.invalid> wrote in message
news:hYIRb.132024$5V2.670890@attbi_s53...

[Barry Watzman]

You cannot use 1.2 MB "high density" floppies in a "360k" single or
double density drive. The formulation of the magnetic oxide media is
wrong for that type of drive. This may be your problem.

[Lee Hart]

There are two basic types of 5.25" floppy disks. The older "360k" PC
type, and the later "1.2 meg" PC type. They look alike, but are not
interchangeable. If there is a label on the disk, it is usually labelled
"high density". Of course, the actual storage capacity depended on the
computer and the type of disk drive it was used in. Only use the older
"360k" type floppy disks in the Kaypro.

There is nothing written on the disk that FORMATting it won't erase.
However, many FORMAT programs only write data; they don't check to see
if the data actually got written properly onto the disk. You can
successfully FORMAT a disk, and yet it is still unreadable because there
were write errors that FORMAT didn't catch.
--
Lee A. Hart Ring the bells that still can ring
814 8th Ave. N. Forget your perfect offering
Sartell, MN 56377 USA There is a crack in everything
leeahart_at_earthlink.net That's how the light gets in - Leonard Cohen

[legu...@canr.hydro.qc.ca]

Lee Hart <leea...@earthlink.net> wrote:

> us...@domain.invalid wrote:
> There are two basic types of 5.25" floppy disks. The older "360k" PC
> type, and the later "1.2 meg" PC type. They look alike, but are not
> interchangeable. If there is a label on the disk, it is usually labelled
> "high density". Of course, the actual storage capacity depended on the
> computer and the type of disk drive it was used in. Only use the older
> "360k" type floppy disks in the Kaypro.
>

The surface color is slightly different between the 2 types. 1.2M are
usually darker gray, and 360K disks are more like brown. In most of the
time, but not always, 360K disks have a "hub ring" around the center
hole, where 1.2M disks usually don't.

Louis-Luc

>