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<TITLE>The Answer Gang 84: Floppy Disk Repair Utiliti</TITLE>
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<H3 align="left"><img src="../../gx/dennis/qbubble.gif"
height="50" width="60" alt="(?) " border="0"
>Floppy Disk Repair Utiliti</H3>
<p><strong>From Dilip Boda
</strong></p>
<p align="right"><strong>Answered By Jim Dennis, Rick Moen, Mike Orr, Jay R. Ashworth, Karl-Heinz Herrmann,
John Karns
</strong></p>
<P><STRONG>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/qbub.gif" ALT="(?)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
>
I am have much many 0 track bad Floopy disks. How can i repair it?
</STRONG></P>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [JimD]
In general I've noticed that floppy media and drives have dropped so
drastically in quality that they can no longer be relied upon.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [Mike]
<EM>Dropped</EM> in quality? <EM>No longer</EM> be relied on? When have floppies
<EM>ever</EM> excelled in reliability?
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [JimD]
[Rant mode="on"]
Read my virtual lips! Markedly DROPPED in quality. The number of
drives and media failures I've encountered in the last two years has
exceeded the absolute number of failures that I experienced in my
first 10 years of regular computer use (despite that fact that I use
them far less often then I used to).
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
Maybe it's just me, but every indication I've see suggests that
this is a real shift. When we were spending $100 (US) on a drive and
anywhere from a dollar to 50 cents each for the media --- we could
usually expect to get only 1 initial failure from a box of ten (or
less) and I'd usually see the drives last for three or four years of
moderate use (several floppies and a few dozen file writes per day)
with very few failures. Now we spend less than $20 on a floppy drive
and flip a coin to see if it'll work with any given diskette.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
Yes, it is possible to sacrifice quality to the point where there is
no value in the commodity. I think we've now seen it with floppies.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
Sadly CDR, CDRW, and DVDR related technologies are a poor substitute.
I have a nice Magneto Optical (MO) drive that needs no special software
or drivers! It just looks like a removable SCSI hard drive to any
OS can handle such a thing. There's none of this fuss about mkisofs,
just pop in the media and copy files thereto/therefrom.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
The computer industry as done us a great disservice by having each
company come up with it's own high capacity removable media standards
(ZIP this, Jaz that, etc. This leaves no clear choice for the consumer
to have high capacity, removable media with sufficient ubiquity that
they know they can get media at any local office supply joint and that
they can hand their media to almost any associate with a reasonable
expection that it's useful to them.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
[Scream! Type="blood curdling"] ARGH! [/Scream!]
[Rant mode="off"]
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [Rick]
In my experience, if the software consistently tells you that a floppy
disk's track zero is bad, it usually means there really is a physical
surface defect. Actual surface defects on a floppy cannot be repaired.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
However, before you give up entirely on that floppy, try, while logged
in as the root user[1], "fdformat <TT>/dev/fd0</TT>". <TT>/usr/sbin/fdformat</TT> performs
a low-level format of the floppy, and sometimes will fix problems that
originate in logical disk organisation (formatting), as opposed to
surface defects.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [Jay]
mtools access the raw disk directly; the low-level file format of FAT
volumes is wired into a library mtools uses. So maybe mtools could
reach the diskettes.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
Rick's right, though, mformat is more equivalent to mkfs than to a
low-level format.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
It's worth remembering here, too, that <EM>maybe</EM> the problem is the
drive. Floppy drives do go bad sometimes, and one possible symptom of
a head-carriage misalignment could be Track 0 bad.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [JimD]
More likely the drive head is simply being scraped clean and the
fabric inside the floppy shell may actually be cleaning the media
surface.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [K.-H.]
Also a bad drive might actually damage floppies, so every floppy inserted
might be really bad afterwards. A second floppy drive in another computer
comes in handy in these cases....
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [John]
In situations where the drive isn't used a lot, particularly in larger
urban or industrial environments where there is the presence of carbon in
the air, the carbon will collect on plastic parts such as the head cover,
and subsequently smear on the floppy.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
In any event, for those so inclined, before tossing out the drive it may
be worth attempting to clean the heads with isopropyl alcohol, and some
kind of cotton swab, like a que tip, although I remember head cleaning
kits for audio gear in years past including cotton tipped utensils on
which the cotton was packed a bit more densely than a que tip - which
might avoid leaving unwanted shreds of loose cotton behind. Or perhaps a
camera lense cleaning tissue.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
<IMG SRC="../../gx/dennis/bbub.gif" ALT="(!)"
HEIGHT="28" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0"
> [JimD]
They used to sell head cleaning kits. I haven't seen floppy head
cleaning kits for a few years, but they still might be available
somewhere.
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
Smoking (as in cigarettes) and humidity (oxidation) used to be
pretty common causes of occasional floppy drive failure. It may be
that a large factor of the failure rate that I'm seeing recently is
more due to the extremely low duty cycles on them. I'm only using
floppies to install (often Kickstart) or repair (Tom's root/boot)
systems these days. Even then I use CD (for most interactive
installation) and CDR (once enough of a given Kickstart configuration
is finalized).
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
Honestly I'd try using floppy cleaning kits to alleviate the problems
(and have some sense of the success rate for it) if I had floppy
cleaning kits available to me in the cases where I'm encountering the
problem. Naturally this is usually happening to me in a server room
or co-location cage at some random client's site. I should probably
just find a buy a couple of cleaning kits and keep them permanently in
the van (along with an extra floppy and an extra floppy/CD combo
drive).
</blockQuote>
<blockQuote>
Usually out of a rack of a dozen machine I can get one of them working
and use it to bring up the others. I'm getting increasing convinced
that floppies are a lost cause and that I should bring in my laptop
with full DHCP server, PXEboot and tftp deamon, etc --- that I should
set it up for PXE installations.
</blockQuote>
<!-- end 1 -->
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<CENTER><SMALL><STRONG>
<h5>
<br>Copyright &copy; 2002
<br>Copying license <A HREF="">http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html</A>
<BR>Published in Issue 84 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, November 2002</H5>
</STRONG></SMALL></CENTER>
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