Modern floppy disk question...

I never found that to be true. I found that they would only last a handful of read/writes before having errors and dying entirely (once they had errors, they never seemed to reformat again after that). These would be continuous use. I always had to treat them like a time bomb, I'd format, copy files to it, and know that I have about 5 or 6 uses over the next half over before the disk went bad. Basically, it was reliable enough to act as an emergency disk to move files from one machine directly to another, and then expect to throw out the disk when done. I found the same to be true if you put tape over the HD hole and used it as DD. But most of my testing was on Macs so maybe they were more picky about the integrity of the disk then PCs were (I've done it on PCs as well, and I don't recall there being a different result, but I also never approached it scientifically and paid enough attention to all the variables, so maybe they worked better and I just didn't notice it). -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>