Re: Apple IIGS with PC Floppies

[Chris Downing <ritz296boi@mac.com>]

Supposedly the disks will eventually start to give you error messages later
on.  It has to do with the way the magentic particles are aligned or
something like that.  I tried backing up some old 800K mac software onto
high density floppies, and they worked at first.  Three years later not one
of them will read.

I'm sure someone can tell you more about the hows and the whys, but from
what I've been told and what I've experienced, it's definitely not
recommended.

in article bLZc8.10326$Uy2.44782@news-server.bigpond.net.au, Mr-T at
jonthorp@-no-spam-bigpond.net.au wrote on 2/20/02 10:23 PM:

> Greetings,
> 
> I discovered something rather amazing the other day when bashing away on my
> good old Apple IIGS. The older 720Kb 3 1/2" floppy disks are very hard to
> get hold of these days, so I decided to try some 1.44Mb PC floppies.
> Obviously, the computer didn't recognise what was on them because it
> couldn't see the FAT filesystem, so I decided to format them on the Apple.
> 
> The IIGS formatted them with no problems at all, being able to store 720Kb
> (or was it 800K?). I copied ALL of my GS/OS system disks to standard 1.44Mb
> disks and worked fine with absolutely no data corruption.
> 
> Can this potentially damage my 3.5" floppy disk drive on the IIGS?
> 
> 
> 
>