jamesh@cs.umr.edu (James Hartley) (02/26/90)
There has been a rash of postings lately about buying cheap 5.25" and 3.5" media, and several have mentioned MEI (800-634-3478) as being a good source. I recently bought a lot of 25 diskettes, and only the first reported any errors upon formatting. QUESTION: When this had happened to me before, I tried reformatting again. With the MEI disk mentioned above, no errors were reported after the second format. I first discovered this a couple of years ago with three bad Scotch branded 5.25" diskettes which reported fewer and fewer bad sectors upon each subsequent format. Can anyone explain to me what is happening? -- James J. Hartley Internet: jamesh@cs.umr.edu Department of Computer Science Bitnet: jamesh@cs.umr.edu@umrvmb.bitnet University of Missouri -- Rolla UUCP: ...!uunet!cs.umr.edu!jamesh
ted@helios.ucsc.edu (Ted Cantrall) (02/28/90)
In article <490@umrisca.usenet.umr.edu> jamesh@cs.umr.edu (James Hartley) writes: >QUESTION: When this had happened to me before, I tried reformatting again. >With the MEI disk mentioned above, no errors were reported after the second >format. I first discovered this a couple of years ago with three bad >Scotch branded 5.25" diskettes which reported fewer and fewer bad sectors >upon each subsequent format. Can anyone explain to me what is happening? > I can't explain for sure... I use to have great success in first BULK erasing all my floppies. It seems that a strongly imprinted magnetic field can be hard for a Floppy disk head to completely over-write the first time, but the bulk erase trick cleans it up nicely. -ted- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ted@helios.ucsc.edu | "The opinions are mine... (408)459-2110 | ...the facts are public domain." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------