fisher@dvinci.DEC (03/12/85)
Atari warns that the diskette should always be removed when powering the
1050 up and down. How important is this? Will it hurt the DRIVE if I
am willing to loose a diskette once in a while? (The fewer steps the kids
have to perform the better.) How about leaving the 1050 powered on all the
time? Any problem?
And finally (this is disk-related, so I'll put it in the same note): The
DOS-3 manual says that a specially formatted blank disk comes with the drive
to copy the master diskette onto. The formatting is alleged to allow the
drive to be faster than the formatting that the drive writes. Open the
drive box. No blank diskette. Call store. None of them have a blank.
What gives? Did they upgrade the drive formatting firmware, but not the
DOS manual?
Thanks for the info!
Burns
UUCP: ... {decvax|allegra|ucbvax}!decwrl!rhea!dvinci!fisher
ARPA: fisher%dvinci.dec@decwrl.ARPAravi@mcnc.UUCP (Ravi Subrahmanyan) (03/13/85)
Sender:ravi@mcnc Reply-To: ravi@mcnc.UUCP (Ravi Subrahmanyan) Followup-To: Distribution:net.micro.atari Organization: Microelectronics Center of NC; RTP, NC Keywords: The advice is meant to protect diskettes from being accidentally written to during transients that occur during power on/off. However, the 1050 also does not have a head loading scheme (basically, the Tandon 55B drives used in it do not have head loading), which means that the head is always in contact with the disk when the disk is in & the doorknob is down; I personally wouldn't want to run the risk of some transient destroying the *head*; though the drive is designed to prevent such weird things from occurring, they do occur (the head is delicate, so is its suspension, and the whole thing may get jerked off). I'm no one to offer advice here, but I suggest you tell the kids the right way to do things, the little guys are often more careful than adults I've known .. Re. the formatted diskette from atari, I don't think that has been shipped since the early days of the 810's .. it doesn't really make all that much of a difference' just let it go..