I did buy a bulk pack of quality 360Kb sealed disks, and they've not given me bad sectors yet. Now my disks in the drawer work fine but half my disks left untouched have bad sectors! booo I made some boot disks and put them in a drawer and left the box in another box. ![]() I had a 1.2Mb sealed box of floppies, each one was great, never a bad sector. So what do you think? I really don't want to throw these disks out without knowing for sure.ĭepends on quality and where they were stored. This is the exact error I receive on the "Bad" disksettes: This leads me to believe that these "bad" disks might somehow be saved. None of the disk brands failed, but brands like Fuji, 3M all fail. So is it really possible that these didks really have a bad sector "0"? Although some brands do seem to be better than others like Tandy, Highlandand Sony. Yet, when I use my DOS boot disks, I don't have any problem. Is there a way to "refresh" these other disks? I find it funny that all of the disks pop the same exact error. I just find it funny that even my stock of NOS disks are giving me problems. About half of them come up with the same errors. So, I decide to take a stack of old disks and try them. There is no option to over ride to try formatting any way. Same issue, But this time I get an error that Track ) is bad and that the diskette is unstable. OK, so I take the disk ofer to the IBM and try there. Then the system tells me that the disk cannot be formatted. I got an error stating that the disk was not formatted, would you like to format the disk? So I select "Yes". I went to my Compaq with what is supposed to be a new diskette, and tried to write some files to it. I started to create a couple diskettes for when I get the new hard disk drive for the expansion unit. So yes, don't be lazy, do it like grandpa, format any floppy before use.Before I get into this I want to let you know that I'm not frustrated or angry, or anything close to that, because I know the nature of floppy disk storage, especially the old 5.25 DSDD diskettes. Also they are more likely to be stored in a less than perfect environment that can reduce their storage - mostly in fact by temperature changes than due magnatic fields. Buying preformated disks was shunned on.įloppies naturally loose their content (and format is also just content) over time. In 'ye good old days' it was necessary to get best results, as every drive was aligned a bit different. Having said that, it was always a good idea to format a floppy before (re-) using it. The misconception of a 'high-level' format (or what ever the counterpart would be) of a floppy is easy to receive from the MS Windows concept of 'fast format' - which simply clears FAT and root directory but doesn't really format anything - in conjunction with drive specific 'low level' formating introduced as buzzword with hard disks (*1). Low level formatting won't help with any of this.Īnd then there's the whole issue of possible defects in the drive: Misalignment, dirt on the read-write-head which will make the read signal weaker, and also cause read errors, etc.įirst of all, there is no such thing as not 'low-level' formating of a floppy. If stored improperly, moisture can form between the sleeve and the floppy, which can lead to mold and other things that may detoriate the surface. ![]() On the other hand, floppies may go bad for other reasons: The magnetic coating may come off gradually due to friction, and a detoriating sleeve material will speed up this process. If you low-level format them, you'll also refresh the flux pattern that's used for "administrative" purposes (finding sector start and end), not only the data itself. The magnetic flux pattern on the floppy disk that is used to store the sector address, the begin and end markers, and the data itself, gets weaker over time. How long they'll stay usable depends on a lot of things. It won't improve "disk longevity", but it will make the disks usable again.
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