3.5" DSDD disks mostly bad

[David Griffith]

On Sat, 22 Jul 2006, Jim Leonard wrote:

> David Griffith wrote:
> > If anyone wants 3.5" DSDD disks from me, I'm all out.  That lot that I
> > posted about last week is mostly bad judging from the sixty I've gone
> > through so far.  With 200 to go, I'll just chuck this mess out unless
> > someone here wants to do something silly like make a suit of armour out of
> > floppies.  If that's the case, I'll sell the whole lot for the cost of
> > shipping.
>
> How does an entire lot go bad?  Are you seeing an exorbitant amount of
> bad sectors after a format?

The most handy machine for testing these is a Linux box.  Since these were
previously used on an Amiga, I need to do a low-level format before using
mformat.  Here's the typical response:

# fdformat /dev/fd0u720
Double-sided, 80 tracks, 9 sec/track. Total capacity 720 kB.
Formatting ... done
Verifying ... Problem reading cylinder 62, expected 9216, read 2048

These disks were found in a box, not protected very well from dust.  That
might have done it.

-- 
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu

A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
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