Care of discs

Before we look at the ADFS in more detail, a few words of caution. Floppy discs

are delicate pieces of engineering and should be treated with due care and

attention. Two kinds of damage can be done to them, physical and magnetic:

-- Physical damage means bending the disc's casing, touching the surface of

the disc itself, or allowing dirt, dust or liquids to come into contact with the

disc. Always store your discs above tabletop height, to avoid drinks, and in a

dustproofbox, to avoid dust and smoke. Avoid exposing the discs to extremes

of temperature, and keep them out of direct sunlight. The disc drive itself is

sensitive to knocks, so keep it on a horizontal surface where it won't slip

about.

-- Magnetic damage is not as easy to sustain but is just as dangerous. Don't

leave discs anywhere near electrical equipment (except inside the disc drive!)

and especially avoid strong magnetic sources like permanent magnets,

transformers, hi-fi and televisions. Never try to remove a disc from the disc

drive while the red light on the drive is illuminated: any information which is

being written to the disc could be garbled.

If you treat your floppy discs carefully they will repay you with long and

reliable service, and with luck you will never experience the depression of

disappearing disc data.

Formatting discs

When you buy brand new floppy discs, they arrive in a completely blank state

known as 'unformatted'. Blank discs cannot be used for storing information

until they have been through a process called formatting which creates a

framework of information on the disc and thereby allows the computer to keep

track of where information is stored on the disc's surface. Note that formatting

a disc completely erases any information already stored on it, so if you format a

non-blank disc by mistake there is nothing you can do to recover its contents.

The Welcome disc is both formatted and full of information, so you can use it

right away. However, when you buy discs of your own you will need to format

them before you use them by means of the ADFS *FORMAT command. You

need to tell the computer into which drive the disc you wish to format has been

inserted, and also how much information the disc can store. There are three

possibles 'sizes' of disc: Large, Medium and Small, but unless you have a good

reason not to you should use the largest, size 'L', which makes use of both sides

of the disc. To format a 'Large' blank disc inserted into your left-hand disc drive

(drive 0) you should type the following:

*FORMAT 0 L

F 5