Nigel Henry wrote:
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.
Ya.
Consider that a tape head for a professional 9 track like used in
backups, costs (do they still sell them?) a couple hundred dollars. The
tape head and capstan and stepper motor combined are the costly items in
those units ($7,000.00 or more in my day).
The tape head in a good 9mm drive would not only accurately create and
recreate data, it insured that the entire tape width was used.
In floppy drives, the same magnetic media was used, but in a track that
spiraled around the flat surface. The 'tape head' or rather the floppy
heads were miniature, cheap, tape heads, and non replaceable. Not only
that, they varied in magnetic intensity by a very large degree. Even
the same floppy drive over time could lose magnetic intensity.
This caused the 'width' and 'depth' of the tracks to vary from unit to
unit, and even vary from new unit to older same unit.
By the time floppy drives became commodity units at $100.00 or less, the
variance from drive to drive was wild.
It was not uncommon for a friend or coworker to hand me a floppy that I
could not read on any of my systems, and vice versa. Yet they could be
read from the system they were created on. This was a clear indication
that the drive was way out of spec. And this condition could occur on
new systems with brand new floppy drives.
As you may guess, my career has included the installation of many
operating systems on many types of systems many many times. My
familiarity with 'bad' floppies was intimate. :)
Personally, I blessed the day that SUN and SGI started shipping CDROM
drives. QIC tape drives were worse than floppies! GAH! Make it stop!
The memories ... BZZZ, CLICK, BZZZ, CLICK. BZZZ, CLICK ... Make it stop!
At least with floppies you got to: "Please Put in Diskette #1-31" :)
