oldman said:
Hi Bill,
I tried but didn't get very far, here's what happened.
I tried to prepare a new floppy to be the desination disk, it was
loaded and the usual response from the system is that the disk is not
formatted would you like to proceed which I did and the result was
that it cannot be formatted, I tried on a few blank floppies and
result is still the same. My floppy A drive cannot format a brand new
floppy.
Hmm, that's odd since it's not just one but a bunch of floppies. What was
the exact error message? If those floppies had two holes in the top edge,
one with a slider, they might be set to read-only, in which case you
wouldn't be able to format them. When the hole is covered, the disk can be
written to.
So, if there are two open holes, look for a little slider in one of them
and slide it down to cover the hole. It's blocking an LED inside the drive
that tells it the drive is OK to write to.
One easy thing to check, at least.
Another remote possiblity is that the disks you tried and failed to
format, are a bad production batch. Unusual but it doesn happen.
Now, it IS possible, if those floppies are very old, that there just is
not enough magnetic properties left on the disk surface to be able to hold a
format. But I'd expect that to show up during, not before, the format
operation.
I can say with confidence though, that MS OS can indeed format floppies
if they are installed.
Many computers no longer include floppy drives these days.
... Not satisfied I load the one and only useable floppy disk in
and I was able to access and update those files and documents in it -
conclusion my floppy A drive is alive and kicking.
That's good; it says that the LED in the drive AND the drive mechanism is
all working reasonably well.
I was not able to
try copy disk on my ancient floppy game disk. My assessment is that
after XP SP2 updates, changes made to the operation of floppies
resulted in rendering the system unable to format new floppies thus
accelerating the demise of floppies (I read somewhere that a major UK
computer store will in the near future stop stocking floppies). Any
assistance in temporarily prolonging the lives of my floppy
collections will be appreciated.
No, SP2 made no changes in the ability to format floppies; I have formatted
many of them on this XP Pro machine and others, too, including a win2k and
XP Home.
They ARE falling from favor and many places are finding dwindling sales
and are preparing to stop selling them, but the OS still supports them.
Again, I just popped the floppy I destroyed in proving the "RAW" file
message earlier into the drive, and it formatted just fine. Then I grabbed
new, never formatted floppie and formatted it, too.
One last possibility that just occurred to me is that hte old floppy
might not be the proper density, dependign on just how old it is. There are
90k 180k, 360k, and 1.44Meg floppies, even some slightly larger with an
FDFormat.
To "preserve" a floppy, you have to "refresh" or "rewrite" the magnetic
markings to the disc inside the plastic housing. You can refresh a floppy
by simply copying all of the files on it to your PC, any folder of your
choice, and THEN copy everything back to it.
For very old floppies, it would also be a good idea to Format them before
writing the information back to them. The Copy process does not copy the
sector markings on a floppy; only the data, while Format rewrites all the
sector markings and checks the disk for bad sectors at the same time.
I did a quick look for refresh.com, a program that will do all that in
one step, but I can't find it. IF I think of it later I'll search my
archives for it and see what I can find. I do know now that it was part of
the old Norton V4 tools for MSDOS.
HTH
Pop`
