Unformattable floppy problem

[Carrier]

I regularly use floppy disks to take my outgoing emails to an Internet cafe and then to bring my incoming emails home to be read on our computer. We have a Toshiba Satellite 5200 with Windows XP home.

Regularly, after some weeks of use, I will insert a floppy that I have been using without problems into our computer and will receive a message: “The disk in Drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?” It contains information that I have just put on it so it why has it now unformatted itself? If I answer “Yes” the computer fails to reformat the floppy. It stops after a couple of seconds and then advises that the disk in Drive A cannot be formatted. Going to Properties and then Tools is of no help. The floppy is shown as being full and already formatted as “RAW”. The error correction tools also stop after a couple of seconds. I should mention that we use AVG anti-virus and this is current. We bring the updates home on a floppy and copy them to the appropriate file on our computer.

We now have a large pile of supposedly unformattable floppy disks. How can we get these formatted and use them? How can we stop already formatted floppy disks from suddenly becoming unformatted and unformattable? In more than nine years of using a Power Mac 6100/66 with many floppies being used for back-ups and other purposes we lost only one floppy to physical damage. What’s the problem with these Windows boxes?

Last month was the second anniversary of buying this very unreliable and difficult to use computer and operating system. It was a very expensive mistake. We should have stayed with Mac. We have already decided that we will never again buy a computer from Toshiba or one using a Microsoft operating system. However, it will be some time before we have leave and are able to get back to the First World where we will be buying another Mac, even a used one if we cannot afford a new one. In the meantime we will just have to struggle along with what we have. If anyone can advise an easy way to stop this floppy problem we will be very grateful.

[Lear_doctor]

I had this same problem recently. I found it was not the disks but the disk drive that was the problem. In my case it had not been fitted correctly so the disks were not going in far enough. To prove a point if you take one of the suspect disks to another computer and it reads OK, you on the right track.

I found the drive was set too far back in the case, I brought it forward, never had the problem again.

No promises, but it worked for me.

Hope this helps


Regards


The Doc

[criticalmass]

The drive may be dodgy, but the floppy as a storage medium is now well past its use-by-date. It is slow, error-prone and of extremely limited capacity, and electromagnetically fragile. About all a floppy is useful for now is an emergency boot-disk.

For data transfer between computers, the USB drives, including the solid-state flash drives, leave the floppy in the stone-age. I have two Sony Micro-Vaults and these now transfer files between my notebook and office machine. A 512Mb micro-vault makes for very fast data transfer and can hold a lot!

I also think the quailty of floppies today is well below that of say ten years ago. Same applies to domestic-format videotapes as well.

Abandon the floppy and go for one of the several USB options.

[Carrier]

The problem continues. Another floppy disk died last night. I now have well into double figures of unformattable floppies. Just over a year ago I bought a box of 10 Verbatim floppies. All have died! I have also had Maxell, Sony, Fujifilm and Imation brands do the same, so it is not a brand-specific problem. A floppy typically lasts four to six weeks before suddenly becoming unformattable.

We are not the only people with this problem. On 3 May this year someone started a duplicate thread on this forum under the heading: Disk not formatted. This poster had the same problem.

As mentioned previously, in eight years with a Power Mac 6100/66 I had only one floppy die. I used floppies for weekly backups. The Mac advised that this one floppy was physically damaged. Our current Windoze Xtreme Problems Toshiba does not give any reason why all these floppies are unformattable. Once they become unformattable they will not work on any computer. Clicking on Properties shows 0 bytes of used space, although the whole circle is coloured blue, 0 bytes of free space, Capacity 0 bytes and file system RAW. Check disk tools will not repair it and Windoze will not format it.

We keep AVG current. It does not show any virus problem. I have tried all the suggestions such as tapping the floppy sideways but nothing restores them. I have to assume that this is being caused by some sort of Windoze-specific problem. Have any Mac users in the Third World come across this problem? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this?

I appreciate the well-meant suggestions to use other methods of data transfer but these are not available here. Like many people here we do not have a telephone. It is a far too expensive luxury item. We do not have any means of direct Internet access. We regularly use the floppy disks to take our outgoing emails to an Internet cafe and then to bring our incoming emails home to be read on our computer. Computers at the Internet cafe do not accommodate CDs or flash drives. We have to go with the technology that is available here. That means floppy disks, which contrary to the assumptions of some posters are current technology and in widespread use in large parts of the Third World. It would be nice to have something more modern and efficient but we are not going to change Africa! We therefore have to fit in with what is available, which means taking emails to and from an Internet cafe on floppy disks, or do without Internet access.

We would like to be able to do this reliably and without the expense and inconvenience of floppies suddenly and inexplicably becoming unformattable. We will appreciate any suggestions on how to solve this problem, apart from the obvious solution of finding another job in a country that allows economical direct Internet access.

[under_exposed]

I see this a lot at work. Floppy drives are not made as good as they used to be.
The problem always appears to be transfering data between different machines. I can transfer data with no problem between two of the machines on my desk but if I put the floppy in the drive of a colleague then there is a 50/50 chance that I will be saying goodbye to the floppy.

[Mac the Knife]

Either your floppy drive is starting to fail or you have some other problem.

If you can't replace your floppy drive then try cleaning it.

1) Blow it through with compressed air/canned air or use a bicycle pump.
2) Try a floppy head cleaning diskette if you can find one - they used to be common and commonly used - 50/50 isopropyl alcohol or meths (vodka at a pinch) and distilled water to dampen the pad.

Try using a different floppy formatting program such as the freeware Format144 - http://www.programurl.com/format144.htm - there are lots of others available for free on the Web.

Let us know how you get on!

[Loose rivets]

A magnet in your bag would have exactly this effect!!:ooh:

[Carrier]

Mac the Knife,
Thanks for your advice. I had tried cleaning the drive with a head cleaner some months ago but it had no effect. I had thought of trying to format the dead floppies on a Macintosh but have not been able to find one. In three years here I have only heard of one Mac in the whole country, an eMac that a teacher brought in last year.
Last Friday I obtained a copy of Formatt144 and ran ten dead floppies through it. Four formatted first go. Two more were formatted at the second attempt and another two after several efforts. I am very pleased with this. It’s too bad I threw out some of the floppies before I realised the extent of the problem. Anyway, it seems I can keep the existing stock of floppies in action for some time, so that has solved our immediate problem.

Thanks to all who have contributed advice and information.

[stickyb]

I strongly suspect the problem is not in your machine at all, but in the machine(s) that you use in the internet cafes.

Whilst I am happy to assume that you look after machine and floppies reasonably carefully, we can make no such assumptions about the cafe machines. In particular, other users of those machines may bring in a floppy that has been in their pockets for days, or lying around in the dust of a car or whatever (depends on which part of Africa you are in!) and then the dust or muck gets transferred onto the floppy drive heads and mechanism, ready to do damage to your floppy later on.

Just as a matter of interest, when you have put your data onto the floppy in the cafe, have you ever tried to read it back before you bring the disc home?