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

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

Based on my experience over the past year with diskettes (brand-name or
otherwise), I'd say the solution consists of CD-Rs/RWs or USB flash drives.

I was getting about a 50% success rate with name-brand diskettes.

There's more than one reason that many contemporary PCs lack diskette
drives: in addition to saving a buck or two (and those drives were so bad
that they couldn't have cost much more than that), they don't lead you to
believe you have a workable storage mechanism.

Unfortunate (only for migrating data forward), but there it is...

Maybe someone else will have more optimistic solutions.
-walt crawford-




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