borton@sdcc3.UUCP (Chris Borton) (04/22/86)
This is an interesting case. I had a normal 400K disk with source code
examples on it. Sometime in the last month (unknown how or when) it undertook
that tumultuous route that brings a disk to one small step beyond flakey and
one large step beyond usable.
Setup: 400K floppy drive. 128K ROMs. Startup disk: HD20. System 3.1.1.
Finder 5.2. <lights! action!>
The symptoms now are: stick disk in, whir, whir, whir-in-the-same-pattern...
It must get past the volume mount, but then has a problem reading something
and sits there trying to read it. Forever. No error messages.
If I <interrupt> to Macsbug, the drive stays on. Same speed, forever. {G,ES}
back to Finder, and it's hang time!
Anyone know what it's trying to read, and why it doesn't give an error after
awhile? Seems like some sort of bug, since I can't even stick it in to
initialize it!
Many thanks and a brownie button to the person who answers this!
-Chris
--
Chris Borton, UC San Diego Undergraduate CS; Micro Consultant, UCSD
borton@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU || ...!{ucbvax,decvax,noscvax,ihnp4,bang}!sdcsvax!bortonesmith@gypsy.UUCP (04/25/86)
I haven't tried this with the 800K drives, but with the 400K drives you can *almost* always force a reformat of a disk by pushing down the little plastic pin right inside the disk slot on the right side just long enough to get the initialize or eject dialog, then inserting the disk and clicking initiialize. Sometimes this fails immediately for no apparent reason, apparently because the mac thinks the disk is write protected. Maybe it remembers whether the last disk it saw was protected?
korn@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Peter "Arrgh" Korn) (04/28/86)
To force a format of a diskette, I go to my 512K mac (and 400K drive), and
press the little button inside the drive down, and quickly insert my
diskette.
If I want this diskette to be an 800K (MFS/HFS) formatted disk, I'll then
hit the reset button half-way through the format/initialization. Then,
when I put this half-initialized disk into an 800K drive, the mac asks
if I want it initialized (being a "non-mac disk").
Kinda a lot to go through to re-initialize a disk, but...
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Peter Korn korn@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU {dual,decvax,sdcsvax}!ucbvax!korn