Friesen@PCO-MULTICS.HBI.HONEYWELL.COM (02/27/89)
I lost the original message and have not been able to find it so I cannot give the name of the original sender (sorry). Someone? wrote asking about current formating programs. He asked if the ones that really tweek the disks can damage the drive. Well I don't think they can permanently, however, if you were one of the lucky people who got a cheap drive in their ST (like me) and you use programs like this you may have to have it aligned often. Do to some copy protection schemes withing about 6 months of purchasing my ST I had to have the drive aligned (it would wine, have trouble loading, wouldn't do disk copys, etc.). Within 3 more months I had to have it aligned again. That was over six months ago, and I haven't had any trouble since. However my computer usually won't do disk copies so I just use ProCopy. On a similar note... I have found some programs that write to the disk even when it is write protected. Something for us virus watchers to look out for... Aric Friesen "Hypnotism; the programming language for people." Addresses: Genie: A.FRIESEN ARPA: Friesen%PCO@BCO-MULTICS.ARPA