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Curious: certain 3.5" floppies can only be read on my IBM machines?

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First post, by red_avatar

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I've been wondering about this for some 25 years and I finally thought, why not ask others to see if they know.

My first PC's back in the early 90's, were IBMs so all floppies we used, were used on the IBMs. When I made the move to a "white brand" PC in 1997, we noticed that certain brands of floppies would be unreadable on this new machine (running Windows 95). Basically, most of our floppies were formatted under IBM DOS and I always assumed something about that formatting was different from regular MS DOS but then why would most floppies work, but some not? The brand in question was TDK. Anyone have any idea? Since I've been digging out the old floppies, I ran into this same problem again so it made me curious.

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IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870

Reply 3 of 5, by red_avatar

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xjas wrote:

They're not 2.88MB floppies are they?

Nope, regular DD and HD floppies. I don't think regular PCs can read 2.88's anyway.

Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870

Reply 4 of 5, by red_avatar

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FancyCat wrote:

Perhaps head alignment?

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/quick-ste … n-floppy-drive/

Nah the drives work flawlessly - the disks worked on both IBMs, just not on anything BUT the IBMs I could test on.

I originally discovered it when I took some disks to my friend who had a "clone" 486 only to find they were unreadable. I believed the disk had died only to go home and discover they worked just fine. I blamed it on his system (back then, the 'school yard' fight between brand PCs and white brand ones was pretty big and I'm ashamed I was one of the brand PC defenders.)

Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870

Reply 5 of 5, by Tetrium

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red_avatar wrote:
xjas wrote:

They're not 2.88MB floppies are they?

Nope, regular DD and HD floppies. I don't think regular PCs can read 2.88's anyway.

Yes they can, provided you got a 2.88MB floppy drive installed. It's even selectable in virtually any BIOS since around 1992 or so? The regular IBM 2.88MB floppy drive will not work if these use one of those proprietary connectors which provides power to the drive through the ribbon cable.
There were 2.88MB PC floppy drives made, but these were always hard to find.
With help of a formatting program (which I think was Winimage), I could even work with 2.88MB disks using XP.

Perhaps your floppy drives were the larger 5.25in floppy drives? The 360K and 1.2MB floppy drives had some incompatibilities. I don't know how TDK was, but quality varied a LOT when it comes to floppy disks. With age, things probably didn't get a lot better.

FancyCat wrote:

Perhaps head alignment?

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/quick-ste … n-floppy-drive/

I was also thinking about this.

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