> The way some of those 5.25 inch and 3.5 inch floppy disks have been behaving > around here lately I wish I had archived my whole software archive on punch > cards. At least that way I'd be able to restore it.
I don't know if this is apropos to your comment or not, but I have discovered some of my older 3.5" diskettes, which were formatted and written on my older IBM boxes, will not run on my newer computers, and the newer computers give all sorts of various messages that indicate missing FAT tables, damaged sectors, etc... but then when I run them on the old IBM boxes, they work. I think this has to do with the older disk drives not aligning with the magnetic media in precisely the same way as the newer drives. I recently have been purchasing a lot of old floppies ( 5.25" and 3.5" ) on eBay, and have experienced a lot of various errors during installs, too, ending in ( Abort, Retry, Fail ), but have so far been able to recover the installs in all cases, by removing the old floppies repeatedly, and manually rotating the magnetic media, and hitting retry (sometimes as many as 20 times). In a few cases, I have lost a bad sector or two in the process, and the file associated with it, but so far have been extraordinarily lucky, in that the lost data turned out to be part of the help files, or something else not totally essential to the programs. -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/ When did ignorance become a point of view? To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
