First post, by i486_inside
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Today I got my 6 boxes of 5 1/4 HD disks I ordered off of eBay, I had one box of Dysan 100 disks in a neat plastic case and 5 boxes of Fujifilm disks in cardboard boxes. All of the boxes were brand new and sealed , the Fuji disks seem to be from around 1990 because they have something about the 1990 World Cup on the box. I opened one of the boxes of Fuji disks up and I created a dos start up disk and played around with it for a while, then I decided I would format and copy the system files to another disk out of another box, when I tried I got an error about the disk being unsuitable for a system disk, so I tried more of the disks from that box with the same results, so I decided I would reformat all 60 disks, I found that essentially one whole box of the Fuji disks would either fail to format or would format with a lot of bad sectors with the exception of two disks that I still wouldn't trust since the rest of the box was bad, only one disk out of the other Fuji boxes formatted with any bad sectors and it only lost ~30kb due to bad sectors. Sadly 4 of the 10 Dysan disks formatted with bad sectors.
So my point is do you find that it is a good idea to reformat 5 1/4 floppies even if they are preformatted and brand new since most of these disk have been sitting in unknown conditions for 25+ years and if they have degraded formatting them will expose bad sectors?