Re: Shocked ...

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

penman@No-spam-cotse.com writes ...
> 
> Note that I said "fairly soo" and not as you seem to think, "fairly
> fast."  Your milage will vary, depending on the flux your particular
> drive can handle and put out.  I've heard of people who have kept
> data on a HD disk for months, some that only were readable for a day
> or two.  BTW--the fact that the disk was originally set up as an
> IBM one is immaterial to the discussion
 ....

     It turns out (kind of surprisingly) that it may be significant.

     As an experiment, I took an old "1MB" (no HD notch) 3.5" diskette which
had been used for storing material on a friend's PC and tried formatting it
on the GS. It got fairly far along and was kicked out ("I/O error").

     The diskette was then exposed to several passes with a demagnetizer and
reinserted for another formatting try. It still would not get through the
format.

     Figuring that a PC format might wipe out the bad area, I stuck it in our
PC. Despite a couple GS formatting attempts and a demag wipe, the thing
actually came on-line and showed a directory with two files. And, both files
(one of which was 700k+ in size) loaded okay into a hex editor!

     Anyway, the diskette was formatted for 720k. Our PC wasn't happy with
some portions of the disk and these got marked as having bad sectors.

     The diskette was once again inserted into a standard 3.5" drive on the
IIgs. This time it formatted and worked fine as the target for a disk copy.

     Knowing the diskette's history, it seems reasonable to believe that
there is no way a IIgs could reliably format such a diskette. Whatever PC had
written to the diskette had positively blasted the media. Our IIgs got
through a format and disk copy with the disk; but, prospects for long-term
data retention seem very poor.



Rubywand