Questions about a floppy with bad sectors....

[judgehopkins]

This is more of an intellectual challenge than a real problem.

I have a HD floppy with bad sectors. (I know...the answer is, "Throw it away.")

I have tried "curing" it with myformat (an otherwise excellent program) and with chkdsk.

No luck.

My question: Is there a program that will format a floppy so as to cure its bad sectors?

Thanks.

There are two guaranteed rules of success: First, never tell everything you know.

 

[theEclipse]

as far as I knew, a bad sector was a spot on a disk where the disk can't reliably store data -- the magnetic film is mechanically or chemically unable to store a binary sequence.

Robert Carpenter
Remember....eternity is much longer than this ~80 years we will spend roaming this earth.
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http://www.robertcarpenter.net

 

[Glenn9999]

What I do when I work on floppies is:

1. Format them. I sort aside the ones with bad sectors with the good formats.

2. On the ones with the bad sectors, you can sometimes make them usable by zeroing out the media (low-level format) and then reformatting them. Keep in mind, HD floppies really hold 2.0MB of data instead of 1.44MB - the excess space is for the structures of the file system. Sometimes the file system structures get corrupted to cause the bad sector, so doing this would fix it.

3. (sometimes you can guess at this if you hear the drive in 1 or 2) If it's really a media problem, 1 or 2 will fail and either not work or produce bad sectors again upon the reformat. In this case, the floppy disk goes in the trash can.

(and before people say something, I've had disks with bad sectors on format in step #1, get fixed with step #2, and I went on to use them for quite a long time afterwards with no problem)

 

[judgehopkins]

And how does one do this?:

...

2. On the ones with the bad sectors, you can sometimes make them usable by zeroing out the media (low-level format) and then reformatting them. Keep in mind, HD floppies really hold 2.0MB of data instead of 1.44MB - the excess space is for the structures of the file system. Sometimes the file system structures get corrupted to cause the bad sector, so doing this would fix it.

....

There are two guaranteed rules of success: First, never tell everything you know.

 

[edfair]

You could try downloading the floppy formatting set that includes fdformat, if it is still available.

Gives you the capablility of going larger than 1.44 and changing the interleave to speed things up.

Try a google search for fdformat.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[Glenn9999]

I use a DOS program I got sometime ago called BCWipePD to wipe a floppy disk, though there are many other programs out there that will do the same thing under Windows.