Re: Apple IIGS with PC Floppies

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.ca>]

Mr-T wrote:

> 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?

It won't damage your drive but those 1.4mb floppies formatted 800k are
generally less reliable than regular 800k floppies. It appears that it varies
according to the brand and maybe batch of floppie as well as the particular
drive you wrote them on. Sometimes they last years, sometime a lot less.
The most spectacular failure I know of was when I was IIgs PD librarian.
A friend copied half a dozen floppies, In 2 hours one was unreadable, in 4
hours 3 were unreadable and by the next morning none worked. I'd use
them if I had to but I wouldn't trust them with anything important.

    Wayne