Reiability of wrong media (was: is out of 5-1/4" diskettes - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

21 Jan 1999

On Jan 21, 16:58, Sam Ismail wrote:
...
  Subject: Re: Reiability of wrong media (was: is out of
5-1/4" diskettes
 On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Pete Turnbull wrote:

 >  "OK, so that's a flippy", I said to myself.  A little later, I
re-read the
...
  > catalogue -- and got a different listing!  I had
inadvertantly catalogued
...
  > side two, with the disk right-side-up -- and
realised that the tracks must
...
  > not line up, so side two had two sets of data,
going in opposite rotations,
...
   with the
tracks interleaved! 
 This can't be possible!  Otherwise, why didn't someone exploit this to
 make 4-sided diskettes?? 
It was an 80-track drive, but the disk was formatted to 40 tracks
originally -- there just happened to be two sets of 40 on one of the sides.
 The second set was probably recorded on a double-stepped 80-track drive,
so the track width was only half as wide as a real 40-track would have
written, and becuse of the offset between upper and lower heads, just
happened to fall in the right place.

It would be an awfully complicated way to get 80 tracks out of an 80 track
drive :-)

-- 

Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York