[3318] in Athena Bugs
3100 3 1/2 Disks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Morrison)
Thu Sep 28 17:55:41 1989
To: cfyi@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, olc-stock@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
From: Dave Morrison <drmorris@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: olc-stock[698]
Cc: mgmorris@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 89 17:55:00 EDT
By trial and error, this is what I have found with the 3100 drives.
The only programs I know of to read and write from these disks is the
dosread suite. 'tar cvf /dev/floppy' gives me an I/O error. You need
to format the disks elsewhere.
3100 drives only take high density disks. They don't like low density
disks in MS-DOS, PRODOS or MAC format.
3100 drives don't like write protected disks. I tried to read a write
protected disk, and it gave me a floppy read error on all subsequent
attempts to read the floppy. This happened 2 times on 2 different
disks. Each time I was no longer able to read the disk at home, and
had to reformat it.
High density disks should be formatted in MS-DOS format.
The drives have twice ejected a disk with the metal protective cover
locked open. I had to push the cover in until it snapped, before the
cover would shut again. This happened on two separate machines
(COPILOT and one in the Stud Center).
It is good to save the file you wish to transfer on multiple disks, in
order to save multiple trips between your PC and Athena. I would not
consider 3 1/2 disks on 3100s a reliable backup scheme at this point.
Have other people had bad experiences trying to use these drives?
Dave Morrison
