floppies a la 410 k per side

[John Buchanan]

This is my first posting.

I recently picked up a program that formats floppies with an extra
50 k per side. This is probably old news but if it isn't and you let me
know then I'll attempt to post it.

I am going to be writting a desk accessory that will act as a normal
address book with a few plus. I hope to post it when I'm done. If there
exists any suggestions please mail them to me.

buchanan@utcsri

john Buchanan
Dept of Computer Science
U of Toronto
Toronto Canada

[Paul Smee]

Maybe someone's said it before, though I've been watching a lot longer
than i've been talking and haven't seen it. I am using 'over-formatted'
disks for bulk storage of some things. However there is one short-coming
which people should be aware of. Some programs think they know what a
disk looks like and will not work on, or with, nonstandard disks.

******* IN PARTICULAR *******

The desktop 'whole disk copy' (move disk icon A over disk icon B) will
**NOT** properly copy a whole 410K disk onto another 410K disk. It
*looks* like it is working, but in fact only 9 sectors per track get
copied over. The 10th on the target disk is left containing the trash
pattern put in by the formatter. (This is definitely true with the
version of ROM TOS which I've got. If other people don't have this
problem, you're lucky. At least check first, before counting on this.)

I suspect that the 'whole disk copy' also only knows about 80 tracks per disk
and that it will therefore do the wrong thing with 82 track 9sector disks,
but I haven't checked that.

File-by-file copies appear to work fine -- though I confess I now do a
compare between source and target files before trusting the result as
backup.