Broken floppy disks

[Chuck Guzis]

On 19 Aug 2007 at 19:22, Dave Dunfield wrote:

> Windows and even "bare" DOS try and read block 0 to see what kind of
> disk it is - if it's unreadable in a certain way, it fails with "track
> 0 bad" ... You can't even format these disks.

Well, DOS 6.x had the /f switch on the FORMAT command--which told DOS 
to forget about trying to read the disk, just format it.  I believe 
that DOS 7.x ignores /f.  And for DOS, there are always third-party 
formatters.

Cheers,
Chuck