I think I've found a cure for my '800k floppy disease'

[Apostrophe]

Hi,

A lot of my 800k floppy disks, old or new, have the habit of being illegible on my SEs. 'Erase disk' from the Special menu rarely helped. Sometimes they'll ask "The disk 'disk name here' needs minor repairs. Would you like to repair the disk?" and clicking Yes doesn't cure it, and it just ejects the disk.

Here's the thread.

But I think I've found a cure to this 800k floppy disease!! Believe it or not...it's Disk First Aid. Works every time so far.

-Apostrophe

 

[luddite]

Seems obvious in hindsight, but I've had the same problem and never thought to use Disk First Aid... thanks for posting this.

 

[porter]

Works every time so far.

I think it is masking over a deeper problem, I wouldn't trust them.It sounds like a physical/magnetic/electro/mechanical problem, not a digital one.

 

[Charlieman]

My preferred solution to floppy disk rot is to burn an image while the disk is still working. Prior to Mac System 6, real floppy disks are essential, but if you have a disk image you can create a real one on demand. You can create disk images for almost any operating system -- I have many for CP/M and DOS.

At the same time, I have hundreds of Mac disks created in the 1980s and 1990s that work reliably. I only have enough time to make images of those that are truly unusual or essential.

Porter makes a good point, though. You shouldn't be suffering from disk access problems, even on an SE. You need to analyse your disk creation process, identify the disk drive that causes problems and then fix it. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for a nasty data loss.

 

[shred]

I remember this being a common problem back when 800k disks were popular. We concluded that sometimes some critical piece of data on the disk gets corrupted and Macs refuse to touch the disk afterwards.

The solutions we used with great success were to either:

a) hit the disk with a bulk tape eraser, then re-format OR

B) format the disk in a 720k IBM floppy drive, then reformat in a Mac

Either solution "fixed" the disk properly and it would then go on to perform faultlessly.

Never thought of using Disk First Aid though: that's a good tip, especially when you don't have either of the other options available - thank you.

 

[porter]

When you erase a disk it does a check, and may mark some blocks as being bad, you can see this in the space available. If you erase a number of times it should settle to a constant number.

 

[Charlieman]

Also experiment with software such as Disk Charmer, especially if you want to reformat a box of disks of unknown integrity.