Robert C Wittig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
The floppy drives that IBM used in their PS/2 line were in- credible; they would read anything! They would even format and read 720k disks as 1.44MB - if you drilled a hole in the case, or fudged with the internal switch. (Other brands would balk at such a beast.) These old microchannel monsters are worthwhile keeping around, if only for the purpose of reading a floppy that is troublesome in a newer (read that "more cheaply made") machine. Your trick of rotating the 5.25 in floppies inside the sleeve is a sound one, and old, too. But it won't help much if capacity was "boosted". (I remember it was common to squeeze 800k or so out of a 360k disk formatted for 1.2Meg. There were plenty of locked- out "bad" sectors, but as long as it was read on the same drive which created it, there wasn't a problem.) Too bad there was no thought given to treating these as a long- term archive, though. (10-18 years later, there's little chance of recovering anything from such disks.) - John T. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/ 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
