I've gone thorugh three boxes of floppies in a period of bout four months. Playing with old systems, floppies are a requirement. But it seems if I let them sit for a week, they're full of bad sectors.
Why? I keep my drives clean, and the disks are away from dirt and magnetism. Why do they keep dying?
Do you write and read with the same floppy drive? Maybe one is misaligned.
1+1=10
Null modem cable and laplink ftw!
Put silica gel packets in your floppy box. Dampness kills floppies.
Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.
Keep them away from magnetic objects and fields, especially speakers, crt screens and err magnets.
I have kept them away from those things, DH. :p
I'll try the packets. Where can I find them?
wrote:I'll try the packets. Where can I find them?
I think you can buy them at drugstore, but I'm not sure. I never buy silica gel packets myself; I'm using those that come with medicine/vitamin bottles.
Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.
I'll keep an eye out for them
Hal, you mentioned misalingment. How do I determine this?
wrote:I'll keep an eye out for them
Hal, you mentioned misalingment. How do I determine this?
The only utility I can recall that could measure such things required the purchase of a special test floppy.
Maybe you should just get a new floppy drive. I've heard suggestions that newer ones aren't built as well as older ones for some reason.
The best option would be to get some sort of USB ports on your old machine, perhaps with a PCI expansion card. USB thumbdrives are most definitely usable in DOS with the right drivers.
The last time I tried to deal with a null modem cable, my serial ports weren't working correctly and I went through considerable agony. Trying to do Ethernet in DOS is even worse. And of course rewritable CDs can sometimes be even less reliable than floppies. This is why I've largely given up on mucking about with old computers. 😜
There are some alternate methods you might want to try as well where you might not need to use floppies at all. When I got my first CD burner in 1994 I zipped all of my floppies and put them on CD. Then on my DOS PC I used a utility called srdisk.exe which created a resizeable RAM disk and I would unzip to that from the CD whenever I wanted to install something. One of the best features of srdisk.exe was it's ability to create an exact replica of a floppy disk in RAM, you could even use the DOS diskcopy command with it. Many times I could install straight off that. Other times I made use of the DOS subst command on those programs that insisted on installing from a floppy to make it think my RAM disk was a floppy. A quick Google search of srdisk turned up one on sourceforge. It''s not the same one that I used years ago, but the functionality appears to be the same.
In DOSBox I found I could install many games in a similar method. I made a directory on my hard drive called A_Drive, copied the contents of the zip file to it, then just mounted it as a floppy:
mount A D:\A_Drive -t floppy
Once mounted I could change to A: then run the installation program from inside DOSBox.
Insulation rocks. I've done that in the 90s fortunately for my important disks. My more creative ones with the cool label writing I did with pens kinda is more ruined than the ones with clean surfaces 🙁 sometimes even their dust protectors makes reading worse so i'd have to rip 'em off and save them. 😒
wrote:There are some alternate methods you might want to try as well where you might not need to use floppies at all. When I got my first CD burner in 1994 I zipped all of my floppies and put them on CD. Then on my DOS PC I used a utility called srdisk.exe which created a resizeable RAM disk and I would unzip to that from the CD whenever I wanted to install something. One of the best features of srdisk.exe was it's ability to create an exact replica of a floppy disk in RAM, you could even use the DOS diskcopy command with it. Many times I could install straight off that. Other times I made use of the DOS subst command on those programs that insisted on installing from a floppy to make it think my RAM disk was a floppy. A quick Google search of srdisk turned up one on sourceforge. It''s not the same one that I used years ago, but the functionality appears to be the same.
I would think subst would work quite nicely for most cases, rather than resorting to images and this srdisk of yours.
But that does remind me: as far as boot floppies go, you can make a single CD serve as multiple different boot floppies using another Linux facility named Memdisk. Like srdisk, it loads a floppy image into RAM, only with memdisk you can actually boot from that floppy image. I've been meaning to set something up with a remastered Damn Small Linux on a business card CD, but the easiest thing to do is to download SystemRescueCD and replace the included boot floppy images with your own.
You are right, just using subst in most cases would work. However there were quite a few DOS games and applications that checked the volume label. Access Software (Links, Amazon), GEM applications, and others used that quite frequently. The install would fail if it didn't see the right volume label. When I made my archival copies of my floppies I made sure to use the -$ -jhrsr options to preserve the volume label and hidden/system files. Srdisk would allow you to label the RAM disk, something that could not be done with the DOS subst command. It was just as easy to extract the zip to the RAM disk as it was to a directory and use subst and that way I was sure that I had an exact copy of the floppy, right down to the volume label. Of course I am talking about using this method on older PCs like the original poster had said. Now there are registry hacks and the like to give a volume label to drives created with subst, but on a strictly DOS based PC that method worked well for me and still works on the old 486 and Pentium I have for DOS gaming.
The memdisk reminds me of the old Amiga RAD Disk, where it was bootable.
