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Old 24th Mar 2017, 1:49 am   #10
emeritus
Dekatron
 
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Brentwood, Essex, UK.
Posts: 5,316
Default Re: Amstrad PPc512 and PPC640 luggable computers

My experience with the floppy disks that I used to use with my PCW512 (3" and 3 1/4" ) and Windows 98 PC (3 1/4") was that it was very difficult to corrupt their data using magnets. I did try my best, holding the window open and stroking the end of a powerful rod magnet across the magnetic disc surface while, ditto with an electromagnet made from a soft iron rod wound with many turns of wire, connected briefly directly across a 12V car battery, but was unable to induce a single error. However, I did experience a number of disks that exhibited faulty sectors when I tried reading them to transfer files onto my new PC computer several years after they had last been checked. Fortunately I always used to save at least two copies of disks used for archiving. Reformatting the disks never fixed the errors, but the disks were then usable with reduced capacity.

Unlike the 3" disks, different magnetic material is used in the disks of 720k and 1.44M 3 1/4" disks, so even if you cover up the hole in a 1.44 disk to format it to 720k the results are likely to be disappointing. I tried both using the floppy drive of my WIN 98 PC and the external 720k 3/14 " disk drive that I got for my PCW8512 that could be used to format disks to either the PCW format or MS-DOS format for exporting ASCII text files to a conventional PC. Before I managed to obtain a good stock of the proper 720k disks, I did sometimes get it to work, but it took an age to write as repeated write actions were necessary.

Last edited by emeritus; 24th Mar 2017 at 1:56 am.
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