Floppy woes
 

Hello everyone, I'm having trouble with some floppies I bought. At first they worked fine, but as I have been re-using them, it seems they are ruined. Is this so? I'd like to know how to COMPLETELY wipe a floppy and then reformat it so there are no errors on it. Is this possible? So far I have been using fdformat, mkdosfs, and superformat under Debian Etch, but when i dd things onto floppies, or at least try, I almost always get "i/o error" and the floppy doesn't work or only partially works. Can this be helped, or did i ruin the floppies? Should I go out and buy more? Thanks alot!

fdformat, mkdosfs, and superformat find bad blocks on your floppy and mark them in the file system so that your programs can work around the bad blocks. To do so the program must access the floppy through a file system.

dd does not access the floppy through a file system. It writes each block to an absolute block address. If dd tries to write to a bad block it encounters an unrecoverable I/O error.

So floppies with bad blocks can be used with normal file system access but probably won't work with dd.

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Steve Stites

Um I know there is still use for floppy disks but wouldn't your money be better spent if you get a jump drive? I mean, Office Depot has a 10 pack set of floppies for $7.46 US dollars thats 14.4mb of storage or you can get a 1GB jump drive for $8.98 US Dollars at Walmart (Not that I like Walmart) that's like 711 floppy disks for about the same price as the 10 pack.

LOL

the reason i need floppies is because I'm working with a Toshiba portege 610CT which only has a floppy drive to work with and network card. I'm trying out floppy based distros but am having trouble finding good disks. This is getting rather annoying. Is it a physical problem, ie are they duds/lemons, or can they be restored to perfect working order? Most of the ditros require the use of dd at some point or another.

They have a physically bad spot on them. Linux gets around bad spots by the way that file systems are organized. So floppies with bad blocks can be used indefinitely.

dd cannot handle bad blocks correctly. So keep track of the floppies which have bad blocks and don't bother to try using those floppies with dd. If you run out of floppies that have no bad blocks then buy some new floppies to use with dd.

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Steve Stites