Broken floppy disks

I've had pretty good reliability with 3 1/2" disks, if you keep the drive clean, and make sure that the disks aren't dirty or have that "gritty" sound to them, they typically work OK. I typically use the fdformat (or superformat) under Linux - you can have it format the whole disk before going back and verifying, sometimes it might take a pass or two before the disk verifies OK. Degaussing the disks with a bulk eraser would be a good idea too. But be sure that your drive is good and clean. I've also had better luck with older floppy drives - Mitsumi, Chinon and Teac drives seem to be very reliable. Blow the fuzzies out before use. Also, be sure your BIOS is set right - I had a hell of a time a couple weeks ago trying to write a disk on a PC here, it was just a simple boot disk, but I tried four floppies, checking the image, reformatting, etc - then I remembered that last time I used the PC, I had a 1.2mb 5 1/4" drive as drive 0. Bios was set wrong, and the whole time I was trying to write data to the disk at the wrong data rate. Doh! -Ian