On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 11:56 AM, chris knight <[email protected]> wrote:
> > However, I just bought a box of floppies (for the first time in at > least 15 years!), and they will not format in either the SE/30 > (initialization fails) or the USB floppy drive (using MacDrive's HFS > format option). These disks do say "IBM-formatted" (which I assume > means FAT), but I need HFS in order to get System 6.08 to see them > (and to transfer files without losing resource forks). > > Sounds like the disks themselves could be bad, if the floppy drives in question are operating fine. What brand of disks are they? In my experience recently, I've found that floppy disks manufactured today have a much higher failure rate than old floppy disks - I think very little attention is paid to quality, and very few buyers of floppy disks must care enough to complain. (Back in the 1980s, floppy disks were expensive and all the good brands had lifetime warranties.) All Macs will do a verification pass on a formatted floppy, to make sure it's a good floppy. Older versions of the OS would fail the format if there was even one bad sector found. Later versions (perhaps starting with OS 8?) would start to lock out bad sectors in a second verification pass, and as long as the number of bad sectors didn't exceed a certain threshold, you could still use the disk, however the total usable capacity would be reduced by the number of bad sectors locked out (and if there were too many bad sectors, it could still fail to format). So I'd say you either have bad floppy drives, or more likely, bad floppy disks. - Nate --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
