🚀 go-pugleaf

sandrad1@cq-pan.cqu.edu.au (Sandra Doak) writes:

>I bought these mid-range priced disk and when I use them , they
> got bad sectors...can u tell me what causes bad sectors?

When DOS signals "bad sectors", I think it can be through one of two causes:
(i) an area of disk is dirty or scratched or has poor magnetic properties,
or, (ii) the software used in formatting the disk hiccoughed, or was faulty.

>Lately Ive been dogged by bad sectors on my diskettes...I just wanna
>ask you guys/gals :)...Is there a way to fix bad sectors on a diskette
>Ive got some files that I copied to a disk (completely full 1.44M) and
>when I ran NOrton disk doctor it was unable to move the section
>of the file to a new sector coz the disk was full...

I can only relate an experience similar to yours. I bought a box of really
cheap disks, and decided to run CHKDSK on them. Amazingly, EVERY disk
showed up as having exactly the same number of bad sectors! Before writing
it off to experience, I tried reformatting them, and found that they all
reformatted perfectly, and that CHKDSK then showed up no bad sectors.
(I found that, with two of the disks, the DOS FORMAT command got stuck in
an infinite loop when saving UNFORMAT information, so I used the Complete
format command in Norton's, and it did the job and found no bad sectors.)

As you have Norton's, perhaps you could select the reformat option which
offers to not lose the information already on the disk. Next time, when
you copy important files to floppies, consider using the verify option,
COPY /V filename A: to have DOS check that your file does transfer exactly.

--
John Savage               koala@sydney.dialix.com.au