how to reformat floppies that have data on them

[Nigel Henry]

On Thursday 12 April 2007 20:05, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Nigel Henry wrote:
> > I looked in the BIOS of the other machine, and the only boot options are
> > floppy, or harddrive.
> >
> > I know what's going to happen here. The problem will be solved on the
> > very day that the new floppies arrive in the mail.
> >
> > Unfortunately, I've only got a bike. Otherwise I could drive a few Miles,
> > and pick some up at a computer store.
> >
> > Thanks for the help.
> >
> > Nigel.
>
> The problem could well be the floppies. Depending on how old they
> are, they may no longer be capable of being formatted correctly. I
> have a bunch of older floppies that will not format on any machine.
> I am fine as long as I only want to read them.

Well I bought them about 3 years ago, and most have been setup as bootup disks 
for linux distros, but more often than not, never had to be used, but I see 
the point your making.
>
> One thing I suspect is that because the erase head is narrower then
> the read head, there is too much of the old format being read, and
> it is conflicting with the new formatting. I suspect this because I
> have less problems with the disks that were formatted with the same
> drive as I using, and more with ones formatted with different
> drives. I have also had luck with erasing the floppy with a bulk
> tape eraser before formatting them. This works with about half the
> floppies that give me trouble otherwise. It is worth trying if you
> are going to throw the floppy away otherwise and happen to have a
> bulk tape eraser handy. Using a standard magnet does not work nearly
> as well.

Well somewhere I have a tape head demagnetiser that would probably do the job, 
but by the time I find that, the new floppies will have arrived.

How folks got along with floppies before the time of the cdrom I don't know, 
but magnetic tape for transferring data (Sinclair ZX Spectrum), along with 
floppy disks must be the most vulnerable forms of data transfer that is prone 
to damage. Saying that though, mainframes used to use tape drives for data 
storage, but were in very clean environments, and backups are still made onto 
tape, so it's not necessarily the media, just the darned floppy discs.

Oh well, you can't win em all.

Nigel.


>
> Mikkel
> --
>
>   Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
> for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!