[ILUG] Floppy problems

[Niall O Broin]

On 5 Apr 2005, at 10:59, Kevin Philp wrote:

> 1. Did we just buy some really duff floppies?

Possibly :-) Floppies can really have a limited lifetime.

> 2. Is there some Win/Linux incompatibility with very old machines?

I don't think so - floppy format is reasonably set in stone. I have 
however had Windows not like filesystems created by  mkdosfs  on hard 
disks, which is a bummer, as it's orders of magnitude faster than the 
DOS tools - maybe there's a reason they're slow :-)

> 3. Was buying cheap floppy drives for our Linux desktops a false 
> economy?

Very hard to buy anything but cheap floppy drives now.

I'd imagine that your problem is mainly one of alignment between floppy 
drives of varying ages. One solution is to buy a few memory sticks, but 
that's not much of a solution for DOS machines, nor for earlier Windows 
machines.



Niall