On Sunday 19 August 2007 10:31, Ade Vickers wrote:
PS: Most of my old 5.25" disks, despite being up
to 30 years old, are all
working fine. Similarly, most of my old Sinclair microdrive cassettes,
which are >20 years old, are also fine - at least, the ones where the
little foam pad hasn't perished are. Similarly, many of the compact
cassettes I have for various old 20+ year old home computers still work....
are 3.5" 1.44MB floppies just inherently useless?
Not in my experience, but it seems that a fair number of drives are. I've
had bad luck with some brands, and try to stay away from them, including
one Alps that let the magic smoke out on first powerup, and assorted Mitsumi
and some others. If I can, I prefer Sony, they seem a bit more reliable,
though there are no doubt some others. Got a whole box of drives around so
if one won't read/format a floppy I'll try another before I assume that the
problem is with the floppy rather than the drive. For whatever that's
worth...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin