Chapter 7. Preparing and Maintaining Disks

Understanding Disk Preparation

Both floppy disks and audiocassette tapes use magnetic media to store information, but they're different in other ways. You cannot just drop a blank disk into a drive and use the disk in the same way that you can use a blank tape to record.

Why? The disk's recorded areas (sectors) can be accessed in any order, randomly. The tape, however, is sequential. As it plays, the tape recorder doesn't jump around from place to place—unless, of course, it is being ...

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