floppy a:\, possibly damaged?

[BoobieSrUs]

Ok, Im trying to reformat a floppy disk.. I go to reformat it and it sais to insert a disk in the a drive... alright, theres one in there!
so i tried this on 3 other floppys and the same thing... and when i go to the a properties it sais that there is no used space and no free space on the disk.. i went threw dos and tried a:\reformat and it came back with "no valid drive.". then i tried a:\dir and said "unknown sector.". i tried a:\mem and it said "The parameter is incorrect."
Guys, im completly stumped... any suggestions?

 

[macdude425]

Try another floppy drive. If that doesn't work, it may be a controller problem.

 

[BoobieSrUs]

well i only have my 'a' ... i wish i had to floppy drives..

 

[macdude425]

Got another computer you can take the floppy drive out of for a second?

If not, they're cheap and easy to find.

 

[BoobieSrUs]

yea, i got one in my old emachines .. but its linux based, that shouldnt affect it should it?

 

[BoobieSrUs]

heres a screen shot of my msdos when i try to access anything in a: ...

And yes there is a floppy in the drive.

 

[jason_daniels]

i think its time to invest in a new floppy or better yet just ditch the cursed thing and go with cdrw. or better yet a thumbdrive but if your heartsent on getting a floppy why not get an external usb saves a lot of heart ache. but you could also try cleaning the thing im not to fermiliar with unix so your on your own in that area . hope it goes well

 

[macdude425]

yea, i got one in my old emachines .. but its linux based, that shouldnt affect it should it?

Not whatsoever.

And, adressing the "ditch the floppy drive" comment, it's always helpful to have one around in case you got some restore disks or are creating a RAID.

 

[uzi9mm]

Just try a floppy drive cleaning diskette if you got one laying around or if you can borrow one

 

[icemakr]

i think its time to invest in a new floppy or better yet just ditch the cursed thing and go with cdrw.

Maybe my logic is flawed, but hey, that's all I got. If you cant repair your current floppy drive by using a new fdd cable, or after cleaning it, don't WASTE money on a new one, and while sony would love everyone to continue using CD's we all know they scratch, break, or just suck. If in worst case scenario you have to buy something look at some zip drives. You can find a 100mb ZIP drive (maybe refurb) for what you'd spend on a new floppy, and zips won't demagnetize and loose info, or get scratched and make you resurface them. Since I got a 750mb zip drive I've had less headaches, and used cd's for nothing more than music. It's far more convenient to edit info than a cd, and when you compare 1.44mb to 100-750mb... do you really need to ponder that? It seems to me that someone had to work really really hard to see the FDD still in use today.

This is of course just my personal opinion, if your differs, you might try to ponder the issue more. j\k

If anything, hope you get that damn a: drive working, good luck.