the beginning of the end for floppies

On 29 Apr 2010 at 9:11, Jochen Kunz wrote: 8" floppies are quite reliable. I routinely get 30+ year old disks in and rarely have a problem with data errors. Although I do have an odd case before me. The subject floppies are sector) floppies, but the data is definitely soft-sector (i.e. the sectors don't line up with the sector holes and use address marks (i.e. A1 with a missing clock) to demarcate sector headers and sector data.) My guess is that the drive was set up to handle hard sectored media., so that the controller still sees only one index pulse. The sector address headers, rather than use CHRN type information, use 2 bytes to number the sectors on the disk consecutively. The odd thing is that on a few floppies, the data (and address headers) is in the wrong place for that cylinder (e.g., track 3 contains the same address headers and data as track 9). I'm trying to figure out if it's the customer's drive or his software (he's halfway around the world from me). Very strange. --Chuck