Re: Apple 3.5" Diskettes

[obsbedia2@aol.com (Obsbedia2)]

A note of caution, Tony.  

	It may not play on any machine, but the one that it was copied on.  A few
years ago, my school site bought a site license for BeagleWrite.  I quickly
started making copies for the classrooms, but after twenty computers, I only
found two that would run the program.
	The problem was a mix-up in the diskettes I bought.  They had a ring, as 
Double Density disks do and they were in a shrink wrapped DD box, but the disks
themselves stated that they were High Density--and they were!  
	I'm figuring that the other two computers had disk drives that were close
enough to the same drive speed of the disk drive that I created the copies on. 
When I took an Apple ][ repair workshop back in 85 or 86, a key note was
changing the drive speed when using the teacher's data disk.  This way, even if
the students got a hold of the grading records, they couldn't get it to be
recognized by the computer.  (This was also presented as an April fool's joke.)
	So, while your data may be O.K., if your drive goes, the data may be
unreadable without a whole lot of experimenting.

	Jay Edwards


<< As a followup of sorts to the Apple 5.25" Diskettes conversations, I
thought I would offer this...

About 10 years ago (late '89-90) when I first got a PC with a 3.5" 1.44 mb
drive, I was curious if the GS would be able to use the 3.5" HD disks.  I
formatted up 30 disks as GS 800k disks although they were DOS 1.44mb disks
and recorded a number of programs, games etc on them and filling them up
with whatever was on my Vulcan HD at the time.

I stuck these in a box on a shelf and would pull them out every 6 months
or so and ran a number of the programs to see if they still worked.  They
did and very well too.  I have yet to have a program on these 30 disks 
fail so I guess it would safe to say, at this point, that you can use PC
high density 3.5" disks safely to store GS material at 800k formatting for
at least 10 years.  Several friends of mine have done the same over the
years and report excellent results as well. >>