🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 14 Jun 1998 06:15:51 GMT, nospam@pd.jaring.my (Lincoln Yeoh)
wrote:

>On 11 Jun 1998 01:53:00 GMT, krw@ibm.net (Keith R. Williams) wrote:
>
>>I've found that about half my diskettes that have been stored for
>>over six months are faulty.  It's just not a reasonable media for
>>storage anymore, if it ever was.  BTW, I tried to read a few six 
>
>What kind of floppies are those, and what sort of weather do you have?
>
>Over here, humidity is 90% and temperature is 30 degrees C (tropical).
>
>They sell disks with antifungus protection over here. Before that, brand
>name or no brand name, you sometimes see stuff growing on your disks. After
>a while 3M et all went "hmmm looks like our usual spec stuff isn't so good
>here."
>
>Not good for your data or drive.. 
>
>I'd say stick some silica gel into your disk container. Keep it away from
>sudden temperature changes which may cause condensation.
>
>The other tip I have is. ALWAYS format your disks first. The preformats
>don't seem to be that good. You can copy data onto them, seems to be fine,
>but when you take them elsewhere, ack! Happened more than enough for me.
>When I reformat the same disks, they behave much better. So just FULL
>format the disks first!
>
>A friend says that this goes for Zipdisks as well- use Zip's utility for
>full format and then you will have fewer problems- after he started doing
>that he never had any Click of Death.

I agree, always format your diskettes before using them, and format
them again if you haven't used them for a long time before sotring
important data on it. Also we should consider that not all floppy
drives are made equal, some are a lot better at reading bad disks them
others, I still have my combo drive (3.5 + 5.25 in one) from my 486
because I've found it to be excellent quality (made by Cannon), I
found that floppies that couldn't be read in other drives can often be
read in mine, though the drive does get a bit loud when reading bad
disks, it's not the quietest floppy drive in the world but it works
great. I've also found a few years ago that I could format a lower
density floppy to the next one up and use it in my drive without a
problem, ie ( a 720K to 1.44Mb) though no other drive I've seen has
been able to read it if I did that, so I've used this feature as a
security function, since files stored on those floppies can't be read
by any other floppy drive. Though I've long since discovered
encryption. Still I kind of like the fact that I can make floppies
work for my drive only, the other drives wouldn't even recognise the
floppy as being formatted.

Paul.