Re: PC or Mac?

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Greg Weston wrote:

 >In article <a3em9h$3pa$1@merope.saaf.se>, Paul Schlyter
><pausch@saaf.se> wrote:
><snip>
>> >>> Apple never really switched over to PC format floppies.
>> >>  
>> >> Then how come I can read, on PC's, the floppies created on my wife's
>> >> Mac?
>> > 
>> > The Mac will happily write to FAT disks with essentially no warning to
>> > the user.
>>  
>> She used floppies I once bought her - since I wasn't aware then that
>> the Mac can read/write PC formatted floppies, I was careful getting
>> floppies which were "preformatted for the Mac" (whatever that may
>> mean...)
>
>That would mean they were formatted with and HFS directory structure
>(as opposed to a FAT structure). I don't know your exact circumstances.
>If you can read on an x86 box floppies that she's writing from her Mac,
>she's writing to FAT floppies. Convenient for file transfer, but if you
>don't need it it's unnecessarily slow for her.

Mac 1.44MB floppies are written with MFM encoding and HFS or
FAT formatting.  "Native" Mac HD floppies are HFS formatting.

A PC can read any MFM-encoded disk, as long as it has software
to make sense of the format--in this case HFS.  A number of companies
make such add-on software for windows.  There are even freeware
versions that can read Mac MFM diskettes on a PC.

What a PC _cannot_ do is read or write a GCR-encoded diskette,
but on the Mac these were only 400K (pretty old) or 800K diskettes.

-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
 Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/