Re: what floppy can I use for apple ][e

[Peter Schranz <schranz@ip-plus.ch>]

You cannot use HD 5 1/4 Floppies in the AppleII Floppy Diskdrive, the
magnetic surface will not be correctly written with the low-power heads of a
normal densitiy drive. This is true for any normal densitiy drive. So you
need to find normal density Floppies, however you do not need to use
single-sided Floppies, you can use the normal 360kb PC Floppies (So called
Double Densitiy Double Sided 40 Tracks Floppies). These floppies should
still be available. Although there is a trick to use both sides of theses
floppies (just make another notch to enable writing and insert them top-side
down) I do not recommend this, as the unused surface is mistreated by the
felt that preses the floppy against the single read/write head.

Gilles Aurejac wrote:

> hello,
> since I've repaired my apple ][e, I've tried to initialize some new
> floppy. but I've got only the 3 system floppy (dos 3.3, prodos and the
> presentation of apple ][e) and the only other floppy I have are some old
> PC 5 1/4 floppy, which are HD floppy (1,2 Mb).
> as on 800K macintosh it is possible to format HD 3,5 floppy to 800 K
> format, I thank that I could format the 5 1/4 HD floppy on the apple ][,
> but it doesn't wan't to :
> under DOS 3.3 I get the message I/O error and under prodos the apple ][
> says that the operation has aborted because the floppy is locked.
>
> so isn't there anyway to use HD floppy on apple ][e ? and where can I
> find single face low density floppy ?