THE SYSTEM DRIVES
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2 THE SYSTEM DRIVES
This chapter contains useful information about the drives that are
currently fitted in your computer, either behind the front drop-down
panel or, in the case of the Hard drive, inside the system.
Using the floppy disk drive
The floppy disk drive is usually configured in the system BIOS as
drive A:, with a capacity of 1.44 Mbytes.
Virtually all software still supplied on floppy disk is now sent out in
HD (or 1.44 MB) format from the manufacturer. This is the type of
drive fitted to your Apricot computer. This drive will however read
the common older type of DS-DD (or 720KB). the immediately
obvious physical differences are shown below.
The true high density floppy has the ‘HD’ logo near the window
and an extra hole beside the label, to enable the drive to identify it.
The other hole, that exists on both disks, is for a write protect tab
(on the underside) which, if closed, will prevent the system from
writing any data onto the disk.
Do not try to force the format of a DS-DD disk to the higher
format of 1.44 Mbytes as this will lead to many formatting errors,
with a very high risk of losing all data placed on that disk. This is
due to the ‘HD’ disk having a very different magnetic surface.
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