Broken floppy disks

19 Aug 2007

...
   .... are
3.5" 1.44MB floppies just inherently useless?  Once written, 3.5" DSHD
floppies seem to retain their information 
 well enough; they just don't like being rewritten.  Degaussing 
 sometimes helps temporarily reclaim a floppy for another use. 
I've observed this MANY times, and I agree with Chuck that it's the
most likely cause... but there's another thing which may be a factor.

Windows and even "bare" DOS try and read block 0 to see what kind of
disk it is - if it's unreadable in a certain way, it fails with "track
0 bad" ... You can't even format these disks.

So in some cases, a disk that refuses to format can be recovered by
using ImageDisk to write a good image to it.

Dave

--
dave06a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Collector of vintage computing equipment:
                http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

Broken floppy disks