[ILUG] Floppy problems

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Tue, 5 Apr 2005, Niall O Broin wrote:

> 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.

I had a problem like this, solved it by buying new floppy drives for the
old machines (identical to the new.
>
>
> Niall
>
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> Irish Linux Users' Group
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>