[ILUG] Floppy problems

[Kevin Philp]

One of the machines that seems to give disks that we can't read is a Dell, Win 
XP laptop. For example:

1. Put file on floppy using laptop and try to read on Linux machines or Win NT 
and get a corrupt file message

2. Very old DOS machine reads this floppy OK. Use DOS machine to copy file to 
another place on the disk (just copy with anew name)

3. New copy reads just fine on all machines

Are laptop floppies more prone to alignment problems? All that crashing 
around?

Sounds like the answer is:

Clean all floppy drives
if that fails
Buy a job lot of floppies and replace all floppies with same make / same model 
Buy the guy with the laptop a USB memory stick

Kevin.



On Wednesday 6 April 2005 10:51, Niall O Broin wrote:
>On 5 Apr 2005, at 19:54, Brian Foster wrote:
>>  Apple Lisa, but I may be confused by its add-on HDD,
>>  whose physical format was weird with 528-byte physical
>>  sectors; I cannot specially recall if the Apple Lisa's
>>  flippies were weirdly physically formatted or not?)
>
>I suspect they were - the earliest floppy format on the Mac was an 800K
>format that physically couldn't be read by PC hardware, and it's a
>reasonable assumption that this was inherited from the Lisa (I think
>they were both descendants of the IWM). This is a disk format that
>Linux never understood, for hardware reasons. (Note skilful hauling of
>thread back on topic)
>
>
>
>Niall