[OPLINTECH] Floppy disk problems

[Chad Neeper]

Dan,

This may or may not be related to your problem, but it could be worth
keeping in mind when dealing with floppies:

Years ago I had it explained to me that floppy drives are "tuned" to a
specific ideal point with a certain tolerance level. Think of it as a
range between 1 and 10, with 5 being the goal. When a drive is properly
tuned to within that tolerance level, the a disk written to is then
generally readable by other properly-tuned drives. The fun stuff begins
when you have a floppy drive that for whatever reason (age-related
failure, bad from the manufacturer, etc.) has drifted to the outer
limits of the tolerance range or beyond. Let's say the drive started out
within tolerance (we'll pick 7 or 8), but has drifted to say 11 or 12.
The drive would still be able to successfully read and write disks /on
that drive/, however /other/ drives may have problems reading the disks.
Not necessarily /all/ other drives might have problems however. A drive
tuned to the higher end of the tolerance range (maybe 8, 9, or 10 in our
example) might still be able to read a disk written on the "bad" drive,
but other drives tuned to the lower end of the tolerance range (maybe 1,
2, or 3) might not be able to read the same disk.

It's possibly that you've replaced the bad drive, but still have some
disks that were written on the bad drive. The disks may work on some of
your remaining drives, but not others.

Just a thought.

Chad

Ps.  Then again...it could be a virus!  :-)

-----------------------
Chad Neeper
Senior Systems Engineer

Level 9 Networks
740-548-8070 (voice)
866-214-6607 (fax)

--   Full LAN/WAN consulting services   --
-- Specialized in libraries and schools --



Dan Moore wrote:
> Folks
>     I am starting to see more and more problems with floppy disk not 
> being able to be read on both our public and staff machines.  So far I 
> have not been able to find any thing common with these occurances as the 
> next disk will work just fine.  In some cases the files were created on 
> computers out side the library and in some they were created in house 
> and the disk never left the building.  I have even replaced some of the 
> drives which did not cure all. The computers are all running windows 
> 2000 and the patches are up to date.
>     If any one has any ideas, their input would be much appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance............
>
>   
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