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

[Brendan Boyle]

Floppies are just not reliable.  In addition to the frustrating "do you
want to reformat it now?" prompt there are patrons using old floppies
(retrieving info from the WEB) who are quite surprised when the disk no
longer works.  Magnets can erase data, plastic covers can wear out,
metal sliding parts can get bent and stuck inside a drive, etc.

I now tell people to back up their files by emailing them to themselves
at a free email account.  Hey, they're giving us so much disk space now,
why not?  My library is working to allow CD burning and flash drives and
when floppies are gone for good, we won't miss them.

Brendan Boyle
Information Technology Librarian
East Brunswick Public Library
East Brunswick, New Jersey



-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of plim at ccsf.edu
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 5:07 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
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