800K Drive INIT Problem

[Mac128]

Just came across this. Seems like all 800K drives not being used with 6.0.4 are at risk of having their heads ripped off. Anybody know if this is compatible all the way back to System 2.1/Finder 5.0 and should we all be trying to find it considering that our 800K drives are now antiques?

Cupertino, Calif. -- Apple last week released two new Startup documents (INITs) designed to "enhance the reliability" of Apple products.
>The Apple 800K Eject INIT is designed to position the read-write head in Apple's 800-Kbyte floppy drives at Track 79 when disks eject, the company said. The process, similar to parking the heads on a hard disk, centers and lifts the head before the floppy is ejected, reducing the likelihood of the upper head being torn off by the disk shutter closing.

The new INIT's functions are already built into System 6.0.4, the company said.

Steve Sawyer, partner at CJS Systems, a Berkeley, Calif., third-party repair firm, said he wondered why Apple took so long to introduce the fix. "In our opinion, based on five years of Mac repair experience, having replaced hundreds of 800-Kbyte Sony drives, it's the second-most-common cause of Macintosh failure. The design was flawed in the first place, and Apple has known this for at least three years."

CJS encouraged Jay Riley of Datamagik, an Oakland, Calif., consulting firm, to develop a similar INIT, SafeEject, which has been distributed free since last summer.

 

[shred]

First I've heard of it. I don't remember seeing a lot of 800k drives with the upper head ripped off in those days. Sure, there was the odd one here and there, but I put that down to rough handling and disks with jammed up shutters.

Along similar lines, I recall Apple sending out a warning to their service agents about the dangers of putting the yellow "piece of cheese" plastic shipping "disks" in the 1.4MB floppy drives. The "piece of cheese" was strictly a 400k / 800k drive only thing and could damage 1.4MB drive mechanisms.