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Sony SMO-F551 5.25" Magnetic Optical Drive (help formating disk)

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First post, by 32kofdata

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Got a Sony SMO-F551 drive which gets detected by Windows 98 and Windows 2000 properly.
Bought a new old stock Verbatim 1.3GB Optical Disk (it is the only disk I got) and when I try to format it I get a "write protect" error on both OS.

Checked the physical lock and it is indeed in the open position.
I've also checked the switches on the drive itself that detect insertion and lock/unlock state and they seem fine.
Thinking that Windows might not be suitable to disk manage such drives/disks I've also tried Partition Magic 7 but the app is unable to detect the drive and disk even though Windows does.

Do I need special software to format the disk?

Reply 1 of 2, by nhattu1986

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you got the write protected probably because the drive does not supported writing to 1.3Gb disc.

according to this document: https://pro.sony/s3/cms-static-content/operat … /3864285141.pdf

The attachment Screenshot_2025-06-01_19-36-09.png is no longer available

only SMO-F551-DD/SD does support writing to 1.3Gb disc

If you need software that *may* support MO disc, you can give the Disk Drive TuneUp a try, it does support MO drive and can help you format the disc. (if your drive capable of formatting that disc)
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/782-disk- … ve-tuneup-3-1-4

Reply 2 of 2, by 32kofdata

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Thank you very much for the reply and the list. Makes sense - will try and hunt down a different disk for testing.

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