🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 23:21:57 +1000, Ernest
<deadly1@bywaterDE1SPAM.net.au> wrote:

>On Mon, 09 Aug 2004 15:39:57 GMT, ppnerkDELETETHIS@yahoo.com (Phred)
>wrote:
>
>>In article <2nn1elF2dlhcU1@uni-berlin.de>, 
>>"Jack D. Russell, Sr." <jackru$$ell2@notmail.com> wrote:
>>[...]
>>>hs>To my horror, I found a remarkable hardware failure  rate of
>>>hs>floppies, even from large companies like TDK, made (I think )
>>>hs>after  the mid 80's. My ancient floppies seems to last forever.
>>>hs>But a newer ``preformatted'' floppy can be   readable/writable
>>>hs>and then an hour later when I go to a friends house, I find
>>>hs>his/her PC can not  read the thing. Later,  on examination I find
>>>hs>scandisk  or some lookalike reporting bad clusters, even at the
>>>hs>beginning of the floppy  where the boot information is supposed
>>>hs>to go: Result most programs can not even read enough to scan it
>>>hs>for errors.
>>[...]
>>
>>Even back in the good old days there were commonly problems moving 
>>floppies from system to system.  Many times one had to walk an 
>>incoming floppy around the office until finally finding a machine that 
>>could read it.  (Though in the mid/late 80s I guess this was mainly 
>>with 5.25" 360K disks around here. :)
>>
>>I suspect a lot of the problem was in the tolerances for the 
>>read/write heads.  A disk written on a machine at the edge in one 
>>direction tended to be unreadable in a machine at the other extreme.

Yes, I still have the (expensive) alignment disks for 5.25" and 3.5"
drives. However, it have to dig out the old 286 retrofitted testbed in
order to run the alignment programs. Has trouble even on a 386-40.

>>
>>Presumably, the same sort of problem could arise with pre-formatted 
>>disks?

Dunno. 

>>As for "new" reliability, I typically found about 5 to 10% "bad" out 
>>of the box when formatting the things years ago (now talking 3.5" 
>>720K) and haven't really noticed much better or worse with the 
>>"modern" pre-formatted 1.44MB units here.
>>
>>Cheers, Phred.
>
>
>The mains cause of dead floppies are terminally
>ill floppy drives, with usage the heads get out
>of alignment and they read floppies from drives
>which are in alignment as being faulty. You used
>to be able to get special floppies that you used
>to re-align the heads but they have gone the
>way of the dinosaur. To tranfer data you are
>better to use a CD (burn it and read in the other)
>or a USB drive, both carry more data.

Hmm, I beg to differ.

Most of the systems that give me trouble, are the ones that DON'T use
their floppies much. I suspect that with modern systems, the larger
amount of airflow tends to deposit gunge on the internals of the drive.
Heads, tracks, optical sensors, etc. And not just lightly, in many
cases.

I carry around head cleaning disks, but more often than not, it's only
about 50% successful of those that fail. If your patient, it might get
better through further use, but if the gunge is of anything that is
physically significant, it may well lead to alignment problems.

It's been I long time I could justify fully servicing and aligning a
floppy disk drive. But it's easy enough to pull the cover off to take a
look at the gunge, though.


______________________________________________________
Richard Rudek. MicroDek, Chatswood, Sydney, Australia.
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