OpenEuphoria

RE: [OT] Another floppy question

• Posted by rforno at tutopia.com Jun 11, 2003
• 333 views

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Irv:
Strange. This is contrary to my experience. While 3 1/2 floppies I bought
and used about 7 years ago are still perfectly good (no data loss, capable
of being written over and formatted), floppies bought lately (less than a
year ago) develop errors easily (I got "bad sectors" in about half of them).
They got what is called "infantile mortality". In fact, once a floppy has
been successfully used 5 - 10 times, it rarely develops defects later on.
Have you tried to format them from either stand-alone DOS or a DOS window in
W98 using the /u option (format a: /u)?
There is also a program than can format a floppy with track 0 bad. I'm
attaching it, although its results are not very satisfactory. It contains C
source code. Maybe it can be helpful.
Regards.
----- Original Message -----
From: <irvm at ellijay.com>
To: EUforum <EUforum at topica.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 6:23 AM
Subject: [OT] another floppy question


>
>
> I dug out a box of about 200 floppy disks today - old stuff I wrote 5-10
years
> ago, and tried to look thru them.
>
> Some - maybe 1 out of 3 - could be read, the others, which I'm sure *used*
to
> have data on them, were unreadable.  OK, so maybe data fades away
> over the years, no great loss. I'll just re-format these disks and use
them
> for something else, right ?
>
> Wrong. Barely 1 out of 10 could be formatted using DOS 6.2, Windows 98,
> or Linux.
> The rest return errors, usually in track 0.
>
> So I'm stuck with a huge pile of unusable disks.
> Before you say something is wrong with my disk drive, let me point out
that
> I have 3 pc's and 5 floppy drives. Results are the same regardless.
>
> I expect stuff in the fridge to go bad after a while, but disks?
>
> Irv
>
>
>
> TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE!
>
>





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