22 Jul
2006
22 Jul
'06
3:14 p.m.
Dave Dunfield wrote:
Is the drive (heads) clean? Try giving the drive a good cleaning before you
chuck the disks.
...and if that doesn't help it's perhaps worth pulling the drive and checking
inside for foreign objects, just in case.
have you got other DD disks from a different batch / system that format OK
with that drive? Or a different drive you can try to rule out any problem with
the existing one?
cheers
Jules
How does an entire lot go bad? Are you seeing an
exorbitant amount of
bad sectors after a format?
The most handy machine for testing these is a Linux
box. Since these were
previously used on an Amiga, I need to do a low-level format before using
mformat. Here's the typical response:
# fdformat /dev/fd0u720
Double-sided, 80 tracks, 9 sec/track. Total capacity 720 kB.
Formatting ... done
Verifying ... Problem reading cylinder 62, expected 9216, read 2048
These disks were found in a box, not protected very well from dust. That
might have done it.