PG Manney wrote: I remember _many_ disks being destroyed in old 5.25 drives attached to TRS-80s, Apples, Commodores and other machines. All single-sided. And the single-sided 8" drives were even more destructive -- a disk in an old TRS-80 Model II would die at least 50% of the time if it was inserted at power-on, especially in the external expansion box. I remember damned near pissing my pants when I first saw the docs for a PC software package read "insert the diskette and turn on the computer". Since I know well that a PC drive could eat its children before 360k became standard. I don't know enough about head technology, though I assume that the heads in double-sided drives need to be much more delicate to avoid destroying each others' work, where single heads (especially when densities were low) could just blast away and let the domains hit by the field lines lie where they fell. -- Ward Griffiths Two thousand yeare since Bethlehem and still we hear the lie, that after years of hopes and fears the best part's when we die.