🚀 go-pugleaf

bt@neocad.com (Bruce Talley) writes:

>I had a system where its floppy drive was badly misaligned.  It has been
>replaced with one that works just fine.

>My problem is that all the floppy's I had used in the bad drive had their
>track-0 wiped out.  So now when I go "format a:" it returns with the error
>message "Invalid media or Track 0 bad - disk unusable."  I've tried this
>on 5 other PCs each giving the same result.  Any diskette that had been 
>written on by the old misaligned drive gives the same formatting error even
>when known working floppy drives are used to format these diskettes.

>I've tried "format a: /t80 /n18 /u" but to no avail.  I've also tried
>the Norton Utilities disk doctor but with no success.  I even tried the
>free-ware version of fdformat.exe which also failed.

>I hate to throw 50 some odd diskettes in the trash if there is some way
>of being able to format them once again.

Strange as it may sound, I've been able to solve similar problems by
using a Mac to reformat the disk to Mac standards, then reformatting
them in the PC drive.  (3-1/2" media, of course.)

Another possibile solution -- since you apparently aren't interested in
recovering any data from the disks -- would be to run them through a 
degausser to completely erase any misaligned tracks.

It sounds like your drive's erase head isn't quite as wide as its read
head, and it's picking up signals from the off-spec tracks.  Either of
the above suggestions *should* fix the problem.

On the other hand, this advice is free, is worth every penny of it,
and comes with a full refund offer if you aren't completely satisfied.

Joe Morris