All,
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that High Density SuperDrives
(connected to a SuperDrive Controller, of course) do not reliably
format 800KB Double Density 3.5" disks. I wonder if anyone can confirm
or deny this in their personal experience.
Here's my evidence.I have the following hardware:
A ROM3 GS with a SuperDrive Controller, two SuperDrives, and one
"regular" Apple 3.5" Drive.
An enhanced Apple //e with a Liron card and two UniDisk 3.5" drives.
A Windows PC with a known-good 3.5" drive. I have a formatting tool
that manually verifies every block to weed out bad disks.
A few jillion old HD and DD 3.5" disks.
I can format the same HD 3.5" disks under Windows or ProDOS (Copy II
+) and then run a Disk Verify tool and they all come up with no
errors. I can format it MSDOS and then verify it good, then reformat
it ProDOS and verify it good with every SuperDrive I have. HD disks
that fail verification on one machine fail it on another machine.
Similarly, I can format 800KB DD disks, and verify them, with the
Apple 3.5" Drive on the GS and on both UniDisk 3.5" drives, and then
reverse the disks with the machines and verify them again. Disks that
fail verification on one drive will fail it on another drive.
Finally, if I take a verified-good 800KB DD 3.5" disk and attempt to
format it in a SuperDrive (as an 800KB disk, of course), the format
invariably fails with a block error. This happens with both my
SuperDrives. I can then reformat the "bad" disk with the Apple 3.5"
drive and test it, and it verifies fine.
The SuperDrives can *READ FROM* the 800KB disks without any problems.
They will do a Disk Verify operation on 800KB disks without problems
either. They seem to write files to the disks just fine too. They just
can't seem to format them properly.
Does this jive with anyone else's experience?