A related matter:
I use floppies to transfer data between a Win98 machine and a DOS
machine. I have two floppies that Scandisk will read, but Norton
disk doctor on the DOS machine will not read. Scandisk finds
nothing wrong with the floppies. The DOS machine will not read
the floppies. This applies to two floppies only.
Is there an explanation for this?
======================================
Hi, Karen,
It sounds like it's time to trash that disk and replace it with another.
Bad sectors on a disk can be caused by many factors. The disk is a piece of
metal, or in some newer technologies, a ceramic platter coated with some
kind of ferous oxide coating, magnetic material, similar to what is on a
recording tape. Over time, that material can be weakened, or it can flake
off. Head crashes, where the disk stops suddenly for some reason while the
head is searching over the platters to read or to find a place to write can
scar or damage the recording media where the head touches the disk. In the
first few years of PC hard disk manufacturing, a certain percentage of the
sectors would be defective from the manufacturing process, and as late as
1990, it was considered acceptable on a large capacity or inexpensive hard
drive, if as much as five percent of the sectors were bad. Some brands of
hard disks had a worse reputation for bad media and increasing defects over
time than others, and it did not necessarily correlate with the price per
megabyte for the disk.
Most disk utilities like those that came with DOS, Windows, Norton
Utilities, PC Tools, etc. offer a safety factor by locking out not only the
sector that really is bad, but also the sector on each side adjacent to the
bad one to minimize the possible loss of data, and to account for the strong
possibility that the adjacent sectors may have been partly damaged and
likely to fail soon.
The worst widely-available and formerly widely sold disks for bad sector
problems due to media failures were the cheaper lines of Conner drives,
installed by the millions in cheap computers, and house-brand and
store-brand clone computers. Conner's disk with the CFA and CFP
designations were not the bad ones. Some lines of Seagate IDE drives were
also famous for failures before their time, as were some Western Digital
models.
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Brent Reynolds, Atlanta, GA USA
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