formatting and checking floppy disks for bad sectors

Chuck Guzis cclist at sydex.com
Sat Jul 30 21:25:33 CDT 2016


When I have to go through piles of floppies (and I do this more often
than I care to) I make a master iamge of a good floppy and then copy
with format+verify, aborting on the first error.

The reason is quite simple--floppies with bad spots never get better,
they only get worse.  So you might as well bin the ones that don't pass
the test.

I have a special machine set up with 3 floppy controllers that can write
3 disks simultaneously--disk changes are triggered by simply removing
and inserting floppies from the drives.  There are 6 drives on this
machine, so the work progresses pretty well.

My take, anyway.

--Chuck



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