Atari STart Magazine Cover Disks

Backstory:

STart Editorial introducing the Heidi Format

STart magazine ran from Summer of 1986 to April/May 1991. It usually used single-sided disks, but in November of 1989 they switched to a double-sided format but using a special bootsector that made them look like single-sided disks.

This is called the "Heidi Format", and they explain it in an Editorial note. Instructions on how to use these disks are on page 64 of the November 1989 issue.

But the end result is that these disks are double-sided, but disk imaging software may mistake them for single-sided. This happened when all the STart disks were imaged, so existing collections of the disks are actually missing half the content.

I'm trying to organize locating and re-imaging these affected disks.

Issues affected:

Date	Volume/Number	Affected?	Reimaged yet?	Notes
October 1989 & earlier	Vol 4 No 3	No	Not needed
November 1989	Vol 4 No 4	Yes	No	The first issue affected.
December 1989	Vol 4 No 5	Yes	No
January 1990	Vol 4 No 6	Yes	No
February 1990	Vol 4 No 7	Yes	No
March 1990	Vol 4 No 8	Yes	No
April 1990	Vol 4 No 9	Yes	No
May 1990	Vol 4 No 10	Yes	No
June 1990	Vol 4 No 11	Yes	No
July 1990	Vol 4 No 12	Yes	No
August 1990	Vol 5 No 1	Yes	No
September/October 1990	Vol 5 No 2	Yes	No
November 1990	Vol 5 No 3	Yes	No
December 1990	Vol 5 No 4	Yes	No
January 1991	Vol 5 No 5	No?	No	It's not certain if the January 1991-April/May 1991 issues are affected
February/March 1991	Vol 5 No 6	No?	No
April/May 1991	Vol 5 No 7	No?	No	Last issue.

External Links:

• My twitter thread explaining the issue
• Atari Forum thread about the issue
• Collection of existing disk images
• Internet Archive collection of STart Magazine issues
• AtariMania collection