8 May
2001
8 May
'01
10:29 a.m.
On Tue, 8 May 2001, Tony Duell wrote:
The Shugart 455 (aka Matsushita, aka ...) has a jumper that lets you
reverse the write-protect protocol! You can jumper it to enable on
no-notch, and protect on notch (as God intended?)
Many other drives, such as Tandon TM100 can simply be jumpered to
permanently enable or permanently protect.
I always distributed software on 5.25" no-notch disks. I often wondered
if it was worth the extra expense due to the difficulty finding good deals
on them. Then, one day, ...
Some guy demanded his money back and claimed that there was a virus
(Stoned) on the disk! I was VERY concerned, but managed to get back the
copies immediately before and immediately after that serial number
Not
necessarily true. At one point, I rigged an RX50 drive to think that the
"notch" was still there and was then able to write on the media. Of course,
Well, obviously there is a way to write to the disk using a modified
drive. Otherwise, those software distribution kits would be blank.... from that production. They were OK. When the guy sent
the disk back, I
found that he had punched a notch, written to the disk, and then
put a tab
on!
> So don't assume that those "permanently
write-protected" floppies can't
> have other information written on them - a bit inconvenient, but not
> that much of a problem.
I'm glad that that customer wasn't hardware competent enough to figure out
how. Why can't people who want to steal a copy do so discretely? Why
must they destroy the merchandise and render it un-re-sellable? I had
another customer who wanted a refund "because the program had been
destroyed in shipping". But it turned out that the disk had been removed,
presumably copied, and then put back in (but BACKWARDS from the way we
pack the disks!) BEFORE the package was folded and smashed.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com