🚀 go-pugleaf

Don Locke wrote:

> I would like to be able to check the floppy for bad sectors before
> using the disk.

There is no magic way to ask if a disk has bad sectors on it(*). You
have got to read the entire disk to check.

Most file systems do provide a way to flag clusters as containing bad
sectors but this information can be:

  - Out of date (because media deteriorates further over time),
  - Innaccurate (because the sector is borderline and when tested
during formatting the sector managed to be read)
  - Misleading (because when formatted a quick format was performed and
sector testing not carried out).

In any case this information is not provided (AFAIK) through the
Windows API so to get it you need to read filesystem meta data and that
means direct sector by sector access to the media.

(*)Most modern hard disks can provide a list of bad blocks but this
information has a habit of becoming corrupted and is usually
proprietary and requires special commands to access it. For floppy
disks this option does not exist. A sector is known to be bad only
because someone tried to read it and failed.
-- 
Andrue Cope [TeamB]
[Bicester, Uk]
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/guide.html