What type of floppy for 800k disk

[Ttpilot]

Dumb question: what sort of disk should be used with the 800k drive? Right now I only have some 1.44mb disks. Would 720k pc disks work if reformatted?

 

[LaPorta]

Answer: yes to the 720ks. No to the 1.44s.

 

[Ttpilot]

Thanks for the quick response. I’ve tried making backups using 1.44s formatted as 800k with mixed results. Back to Amazon or eBay!

 

[Snial]

Thanks for the quick response. I’ve tried making backups using 1.44s formatted as 800k with mixed results. Back to Amazon or eBay!

Technically, they're DSDD disks rather than HD floppy disks. The early Mac floppy drives used variable-speed rotation to squeeze 800kB on (slower further out, the rationale being that if the information density is constant & the inner track can get 9 x 512b sectors out of it, then the outer tracks can get about 18 x 512b sectors, though it's not that high AFAIK).

 

[LaPorta]

Genius is what it was!

 

[danny.gonzalez.0861@gmai]

In a pinch, you can use some tape to fool the drive into thinking the 1.44mb floppy is a 720k but it is a waste if you ask me and doesn't always work. For example my 486 PC does not like it when I try and use a 1.44 as a 720k with the tape method but my windows 98 P4 could care less. I only mention the hack because you probably have some tape laying around and its worth the try. If it fails to work, you lose nothing. In the end I would definitely invest in some 720k disks.

I get the recycled packs from https://www.floppydisk.com/ and have never had any issues.

 

[nathall]

Beware of any data written to disks this way; often times the data will disappear and the disk will become unreadable in time.