Fading Floppy on Laptop or USB Drives, But They Are Good
Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2017 10:06 am
Do you know some actual information or self experience of the electronics implementation internals about this effect when working with floppies for PC, floppies for laptops in expansion bay and USB floppies?
I have perfectly good Sony floppies, a box of 10, still from 2009.
When I mostly used my regular PC these floppies always worked well. Now I almost only use laptops to save on power consumption, to go at most to 150 KwH per month in my house.
When I started using floppies from laptops like the Thinkpad 390X, I would sporadically have trouble accessing floppies. I thought that those floppies were becoming bad fast.
But now after many booting tries with a custom OS of mine that works more and more for me, I find that the floppies work perfectly in my PCs. I just need to write the compiled files in those machines to leave them like new. Then the correct access to the media fades each time I write a file in a laptop or an USB floppy. It's like portable laptop floppies were improperly directing the focus of the affecting magnetism for reading or writing, or as if the voltage was too low in those drives.
I can read the floppies normally in a laptop floppy drive if I don't write the media again in it. I haven't tested enough to see if it can fade just by reading, but I have a Windows 98 startup disk of more than a year of having been formatted, and it still works well, so it tells me that just reading doesn't affect it, but writing with non-ideal drives. I think it's the same situation where people recommended not to write the same floppy carelessly in different drives, or kinds of drives, for 5.25" at least. But it obviously applies to any floppy.
It also seems to affect the files that are created in the lower quality drives, not the all the files.
I suspect that floppies could get permanently or temporarily damaged if floppy drives cannot really format the media to a low enough level, so when this problem arises, the best is to check which floppy drive is the best we have, and reformat an apparently floppy drive. The best floppy drives seem to be the classic white ones for PCs from 2009 and older. Chances are that the media doesn't really have bad sectors at all really. It would probably be better to also keep floppies as read-only when reading in lower-quality floppy drives.
This is why I will need to implement at the very least functions to specifically read and write ATA disks, for use with FAT32 LBA partitions, before all of my floppies really go bad, so I can reliably run tests, because with this problem in some floppy drives, I can't know if it's my code or the floppy drive that makes my system fail when loading external programs.
I have perfectly good Sony floppies, a box of 10, still from 2009.
When I mostly used my regular PC these floppies always worked well. Now I almost only use laptops to save on power consumption, to go at most to 150 KwH per month in my house.
When I started using floppies from laptops like the Thinkpad 390X, I would sporadically have trouble accessing floppies. I thought that those floppies were becoming bad fast.
But now after many booting tries with a custom OS of mine that works more and more for me, I find that the floppies work perfectly in my PCs. I just need to write the compiled files in those machines to leave them like new. Then the correct access to the media fades each time I write a file in a laptop or an USB floppy. It's like portable laptop floppies were improperly directing the focus of the affecting magnetism for reading or writing, or as if the voltage was too low in those drives.
I can read the floppies normally in a laptop floppy drive if I don't write the media again in it. I haven't tested enough to see if it can fade just by reading, but I have a Windows 98 startup disk of more than a year of having been formatted, and it still works well, so it tells me that just reading doesn't affect it, but writing with non-ideal drives. I think it's the same situation where people recommended not to write the same floppy carelessly in different drives, or kinds of drives, for 5.25" at least. But it obviously applies to any floppy.
It also seems to affect the files that are created in the lower quality drives, not the all the files.
I suspect that floppies could get permanently or temporarily damaged if floppy drives cannot really format the media to a low enough level, so when this problem arises, the best is to check which floppy drive is the best we have, and reformat an apparently floppy drive. The best floppy drives seem to be the classic white ones for PCs from 2009 and older. Chances are that the media doesn't really have bad sectors at all really. It would probably be better to also keep floppies as read-only when reading in lower-quality floppy drives.
This is why I will need to implement at the very least functions to specifically read and write ATA disks, for use with FAT32 LBA partitions, before all of my floppies really go bad, so I can reliably run tests, because with this problem in some floppy drives, I can't know if it's my code or the floppy drive that makes my system fail when loading external programs.
