asgard@cpro.UUCP (J.R. Stoner) (08/26/87)
In article <1426@chinet.UUCP> ward@chinet.UUCP (Ward Christensen-) writes: >Regarding the hosed-up control and caps-lock keys on "enhanced" > Re: 720K diskettes, etc: I buy generic 720K'ers from 1-800-USA-FLEX, and >was VERY surprised they formatted to 1.44M first time I tried it on >a PS/2-50! I fully expected the "density identification hole" on the >2M diskettes to be read by the drive, but, sigh, no. This was confirmed this week in EE Times. IBM deliberately designed out the ANSI media switch/detector on their 3.5" drives. A major flaw in my opinion as then one could defeat the required protection as you say you did. You could very well format a 1Mb disk with a 2Mb format, but the media process requires a different write current than the 2Mb disk since the media has a higher coercivity. The main purpose of the ANSI switch was to automagically flop the write current when the media switch is active. I suspect that when you have done this for a while you will see that when temperature changes sufficiently around a mis-formatted disk you will not be able to read the flux changes off the diskette properly. -- "To prevent having to tell fools to RTFM don't let on you WTFM to begin with." J.R. Stoner asgard@cpro.UUCP asgard@wotan.UUCP P.S. I help CompuPro make computers. They do not help me make my opinions.