[WEB4LIB] Floppy Disk is Not Accessible, Not Formatted, or Not Recognized by Windows

[Kwangsoo Han]

That's exactly the same problem we have had in our library.
We spent quite a lot of time figuring out the problem, but failed. We had a 
couple of possible/suspicious causes: [1] floppy drives themselves on our 
new computers do not function properly. [2]floppy disks are simply 
vulnerable to physical damages. But, nothing led to a real solution to 
prevent the symptom.
So, what we did is to simply try to recover files on a failed diskette using 
a recovery software such as 'PC Inspector File Recovery,'  and to encourage 
people use a flash drive which is much more stable and has more storage 
capacity.

Wish there is a better solution.

Kwangsoo Han
Web Services Librarian
Chester Fritz Librarian
University of North Dakota

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <plim at ccsf.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 4:08 PM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Floppy Disk is Not Accessible, Not Formatted, or Not 
Recognized by Windows


> Hi all,
> We have seen a lot of "floppy disk not recognized by
> Windows" problem lately. Students saved something on the
> disks using the same computer, but can't open it later and
> are asked to reformat the disks by the computer. Our IT
> people pointed us to Microsoft's Help Center's
> explanation/solution at
> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;1400
> 60 which blames it on the media descriptor byte. However, we
> checked some of the problem disks and found that the media
> descriptor byte on those disks have the correct byte
> specified by Microsoft. So we wonder if anyone on this
> listserv has come across this problem and has figured out
> the solution. If you have, please share with us.
>
> Thank you very much in advance.
>
> Kim Lim
> Skyline College Library
>