I have been using PCs for the past ten years both at home and at work. In my experience, the reliability of 3.5" floppies is low compared to the 5.25" ones. I take a new diskette from a box of 10 and try to format it. I get the message "Track zero bad; disk unusable". This has happened many times and mind you, this happens with all the well known makes like Sony, Maxell, Imation, etc.
I zip and transfer a 4 MB file from office PC to couple of 3.5" diskettes. At home I start unzipping. Halfway through, I am greeted by the message "Error reading drive A". When I try to format this floppy, I again get the message that its track zero is bad! This has happened countless times. Recently, I dusted my old Teac 5.25" drive and fixed it into an empty bay of my home PC. Since my office machine has both the drives, these days I regularly use the 5.25" floppies for transferring files. All these floppies are at least five years old, but they all work fine every time. Many of my friends have faced similar difficulties and share my view.
I have about 50 new 3.5" floppies with track zero bad. I am not throwing them into the dustbin since I don't know what exactly is wrong with them!
Why should a new 3.5" floppy, which has not suffered any physical damage have a bad track zero? How come this problem is almost never encountered with the 5.25 floppies? Is this a manufacturing defect? Is the bad floppy really damaged or is that how the drive electronics interpret it?

I am eager to know what other users have to say on the matter.

Thanks for any responses.

Bala Chandar



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Bala Chandar

I have one and only one purpose for floppy disks. Boot disks. That is it. They are the least realiable way to save information. The reason I think they are all bad, is because they are mass produced to be so cheap, that their are no quality standards anymore. I have some old 3.5 inch 720k disks, those never die, but they are too small to make boot disks for windows. I haven't used teh big 5.25 inchers, so I wouldn't know about them.

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Joe Redd
MCP

I use both fairly frequently, and haven't had much trouble with either. My most common problem has been with 360K floppies for my old XT machines.

SimTel.Net (http://www.simtel.net/simtel.net/msdos/diskutil.html) DOS collection has a utility to fix track 0 bad floppies. Look through the list.

The main page is SimTel (http://www.simtel.net/simtel.net/)

Worth a look, lots of utilities for DOS and Windows.

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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

3.5s are generally more reliable than 5.25s. But they are all floppy disks..
The Track 0 bad thing can occur if you are using the wrong media, or trying to format a 1.44 disk as 720k. You can't do that; see the floppy drive area of my Troubleshooting section for more.
Also, you could just have a bad drive.

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.