🚀 go-pugleaf

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

Deadly Ernest

@bywater.net.au

(my new keyboard, with small keys,
accepts full responsibility for all
typographical and spelling errors)