<OT> Compaq file system??

[dep]

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

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