Broken floppy disks

On 19 Aug 2007 at 8:33, Mr Ian Primus wrote: Most bad 3.5 DSHD floppies fail on the first track (track 0). As that's the case, what you use as a formatting program doesn't matter. The drive's not seeking to get to track 0, so a format followed by a verify on that track alone will show most of the failures--and that's what I use to quickly separate the chaff from the grain. The sad fact is that most diskettes manufactured in the last decade or so are pretty miserable. Awhile back, I purchased a few hundred Imation "made in USA" DSHDs. Thus far, the results have been mixed. One odd thing is that the boxes state "Lifetime Warranty, see inside for details". Well, there's nothing inside... Not that long ago I purchased 3.5" drives by the carton (Teac FD- 235HF) and still have quite a few new drives left over. The new drives don't seem to do any better with problem diskettes than the drives that have been used for more than 10 years. However, all of my cases are positive-pressure ventilated with a filter on the intake, instead of the usual (it seems) scenario of sucking garbage in through the floppy and CD openings. So it could be that your drives could do with a good cleaning. Freon TF is what I use, but methyl or ethyl alcohol would probably work almost as well. On most computers made in the last 10 years or so, I suspect that the floppy drive doesn't get much use, so wear problems should be a nonissue unless you're recycling very old and very used drives. If you want to see media that fails even faster than DSHD, try some DSEDs on a 2.88MB drive (if you can still find the media, that is). Cheers, Chuck