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.