Old Floppy Disks Won't Read

#11

Previously Charlie+ <charlie (AT) xxx (DOT) net> wrote:

Quote:

On 8 Apr 2005 07:49:33 -0700, "Matt" <mattball05 (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote as
underneath my scribble :

The recommendations by others to a DOS system and to Spinrite (use
version 5 which works straight from a bootable floppy) are good.
However the very first thing I would do would be to try other floppy
drive(s) as the most likely reason you see nothing is that your drive
is misaligned to the original formatting and floppy drives are dumb in
alignment - ie. there is no self correction loop for this problem.
Floppies should be fine even recorded in the 1980s as long as not
stored wildly hot or near magnetic fields (speakers etc).
NB. Most people blindly used floppies but never checked immediately
after recording that they were readable and error free, a very basic
error which continues unabated into todays CD/DVD data era!
Charlie+

And one that the only reliable long-term storage medium that
individuals can afford does not make by design: MOD does a verify
of every write in the drive and reallocates defective sectors on
write. That way the drive can also use a read mode more sensitive
to errors than a software-verify can use.

Even modern HDDs do that only on reads (i.e. never or much
later in the worst case). DVD-RAM does it only if the cartridge
is removed and then only in the driver AFAIK.

Arno

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Old Floppy Disks Won't Read

Miscellaneous PC Hardware Miscellaneous PC hardware topics (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.misc)

Re: Old Floppy Disks Won't Read - 04-11-2005 , 10:18 AM