formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors

[Fred Cisin]

On Sat, 30 Jul 2016, devin davison wrote:
> I have a heap of floppy disks on hand. Most with old junk on them. Some are
> going bad, and have bad spots in the middle of the disk. Is there a good
> utility for either windows or dos that can format a floppy and mark the bad
> parts of the floppy to not be used?
> If anything, such a utility can let me find what disks are having issues
> and i can pitch them before i run into the aggravation of finding there is
> an issue with a disk down the line.

FORMAT on any old version of DOS.  It formats and verifies (confirms 
readability), and on conclusion reports amount of space locked out.

It's not an exhaustive test, but it's there and it works.

DO NOT use the "Q" option, which explicitly tells it to not bother 
checking.