Sounds like there are a lot of old floppy drives that have drifted out of alignment out there.
On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Robert C Wittig 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. One or both drives could be out of alignment. Radio Shack sells a cheap go/no go test floppy. Others, probably including pcwiz, sell digital test software that tell you how far off-track a given drive is. One hitch with these tests is that only the original test disk will work - you can't copy the slight, made-on-purpose misalignments used in making it. If you accidentally damage it - that's it - no backups. > 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. If you just want some spare floppies, bulk erasing them by passing through an AC magnetic field, followed by a proper format with a correctly aligned drive, will recover sectors that are not physically damaged. If you want data off a mis-aligned drive, you need a drive that is mis-aligned in the same way. I was wondering: Has anyone out there modified a drive so that they could easily and precisely adjust the alignment as needed? Boyd Ramsay [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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
