I acquired a box of 40 unused 1.44m floppies. only 2 readily format. most say media error/track 0 bad. Is there a way to force format? i have nformat and fdformat, neither work.
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fformat with zero-track recovery works... sometime
or change and test with other drives
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Careful if the disks are moldy they will ruin your drive's heads. Symptoms include smell of humidity on the disk media, failing to format due to track 0, and hearing stronger hissing sounds from the drive, and ultimately the screech noise.. at which point the disk is destroyed and probably the drive head is about to follow.
That being said, I usually use IMGDisk to do a full disk Erase then followed by DOS Format. Goes fine to save track 0 unless the disk is really messed up.
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How does imgdisk do that? fformat, vgacopy, format /u all fail, mostly 0 track bad. fdformat says a: isn't a suitable drive, okkkk. will chuck out the 38.
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andy120 wrote on 2022-12-09, 20:33:How does imgdisk do that? fformat, vgacopy, format /u all fail, mostly 0 track bad. fdformat says a: isn't a suitable drive, okkkk. will chuck out the 38.
Does your drive otherwise work properly ? It could be the disks, or your drive might need servicing/cleaning/adjustment.
andy120 wrote on 2022-12-09, 20:33:How does imgdisk do that? fformat, vgacopy, format /u all fail, mostly 0 track bad. fdformat says a: isn't a suitable drive, okkkk. will chuck out the 38.
IMGDisk's Erase functionality is writing 1 sector per track. This overwrites all typical 15 sector header info. IIRC that's how the Help section in the program explained it. One other thing to check: ensure the BIOS has the right drive type. Specifying 360K for a 1.2MB drive can lead to Track 0 format errors, and also it confuses Format.com's disk capacity detection, though I just like explicitly specifying the disk format (/F:1.2 or /F:360).
Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti
Writing back a floppy image via WinImage sometimes helped making a floppy usable again (track 0 error).
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There is a video on YouTube showing "fixing" floppies with track 0 error with an AC powered magnetic media eraser. I haven't tried it because I don't have one of those erasers.
I believe those things are essentially a large electromagnet that works like degaussing coils on crt monitors(but are much more powerfull). I forgot exactly how this was done, but I seem to remember an element that increased its resistance rapidly as it was heated up by a passing current was in line with the electromagnet. This way there was a large alternating magnetic field that quickly dropped to zero sort of de-magnetising the media. Then it should be possible to format it.
Use VGACOPY to format them.
Or format them in a LS-120 drive.
darry wrote on 2022-12-09, 21:02:andy120 wrote on 2022-12-09, 20:33:How does imgdisk do that? fformat, vgacopy, format /u all fail, mostly 0 track bad. fdformat says a: isn't a suitable drive, okkkk. will chuck out the 38.
Does your drive otherwise work properly ? It could be the disks, or your drive might need servicing/cleaning/adjustment.
Presume so, all 3 read and format the same 2 discs.
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I use Herne data systems with error checking off, can sometimes bring them back
