Starting over with 8' drive on PC

There's no need to resort to magic and reading tea leaves with this stuff. NO IBM PC SYSTEM EVER SUPPORTED SINGLE-DENSITY FLOPPIES. EVER. You can probably coerce some controllers -- as mentioned by others -- into doing it. 160K is double-density (MFM). Do the math! You can get within 10% or so of knowing the formatted track capacity of any floppy by knowing any other floppy of similar physical specs. * 8" sssd: 247K. 26, 128-byte sectors, 77 tracks: KNOWN. OK, double density? About twice that. * I can't recall, and am too lazy to look up (see my waving hand) ibm feces 160k specs; but do that and calc same way. Single-density (FM) 5.25" floppies have about 85K byte capacity per side ("everyone" uses 250KHz). Nearly no one ever used those (cc- list threads accounting for every SSSD 5.25" system ever made, please post to cctalk :-) The head-load "issue" is also a crock. The head load/settle time is spec'd by the drive manufacturer. "Most" 8" drives have more head junk mass, and are slower to head load. If you don't wait long enough the heads are bouncing over the media while you're tryint to read and it causes havoc. This also was covered in this list. One cheap-skate way to test if this is an issue is to clip-lead HEAD LOAD so that the heads are loaded all the time. Presto! It will wear the disks out much faster but will be fine for 10 minutes of testing.