Floppy formatting and using

[Mark E. Mallett]

In article <45 at ushiva.UUCP> raw at ushiva.UUCP (Roland Wilcher) writes:
>In article <439 at zinn.MV.COM> mem at zinn.MV.COM (Mark E. Mallett) writes:
>>Even so, I specifically stated in my original posting (the
>>reference to which seems to have gotten lost here :-) ) that I could
>>format and use the floppies under MSDOS.  So that's not it, I'm afraid.
>>
>I beg to differ. I too can reformat the floppies and use them under dos.
>But dos marks bad sectors in the File allocation table on the floppy
>Unix format has no equivalant mechanism.

You are, of course, correct.  (Having written code to implement MSDOS
filesystems, you'd think I'd have taken that into consideration.)  But
I stand by the point that I was attempting to make, even if I did it
badly:  bad sectors in floppies are very rare.  I'd be very very
surprised if every single floppy disk that I have has bad spots, yet
that's what I'm told by trying to use them on my system.  And note
that reformatting them changes the location and sometimes the
existence of the bad sectors, which I also mentioned.  This is not the
behaviour of a bad disk; it is the behaviour of a bad disk drive,
interface, or software.

I use a number of different Unix systems often; my System V/AT system
is the only one with this trouble.  What I really wanted to know is
whether other people were having the same troubles, whether I should
try buying another drive.  Enough people have responded by saying their
System V/AT systems behave the same way, that I'm inclined to believe
it is indeed software.  Software people (me included) are always quick
to blame the hardware (or anything physical).  Here, though, I think
it's reasonable to question the software.

-mm-
-- 
Mark E. Mallett  Zinn Computer Co/ PO Box 4188/ Manchester NH/ 03103 
Bus. Phone: 603 645 5069    Home: 603 424 8129     BIX: mmallett
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