cctech Digest, Vol 29, Issue 43

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 19 January 2006 15:23, Terry King wrote:
> At 12:01 PM 1/19/2006 -0600, you wrote:
> >Subject: deformatting floppies
> >
> >
> >I would have thought it best to take a magnet to a hd
> >disk before popping in a 720k drive to be formatted,
> >but it seems to not have any (or much) effect. Even
> >using a chunky rare earth magnet! Can someone explain?
>
<snip>

One should probably point out that trying to format HD 3.5" media (aka 
1.44MB or 2.0MB) in a 720kB drive won't work reliably, no matter how 
well you degauss the media.  The problem lies in the coercivity of the 
media (and has been discussed on this list several times in the past 
couple years I've been here).

Pat
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