One problem with the old disks, they may have shrunk. There is no centering like CDs. One might tweak the alignment to get important info. I'm just throwing in, something I just thought of.
I used to make mobiles with old CDs. I don't think floppies would look cool.
Greg
[snip]
The original PC floppy controller allowed 4 floppy drives. DOS would address these with the letters A:, B:, C:, D: (note that later DOS would address the 3rd and 4th floppies after hard drives).
Drive letters don't exist on the hardware or disks, but only in SOME operating systems (DOS / Windows).
BTW, I have an old 8-inch floppy. IIRC, the capacity (single-sided) was just over 1MB.
Optical-burn CDs degrade with time. While their life-time is long, it is not forever.
If you do put vital, historical, data on a CD, you also need a recycling program wherein the data on the CD is copied afresh to a new one.
Every three years, say, devote a day to refreshing your CD collection.
Commercial CDs don't have this problem in that they are not "burnt," they are created physically by mechanical pressing.
I've seen web pages of deviced made with AOHell disks. Floppies don't have the artistic value.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
One problem with the old disks, they may have shrunk. There is no centering like CDs. One might tweak the alignment to get important info. I'm just throwing in, something I just thought of.
I used to make mobiles with old CDs. I don't think floppies would look cool.
Greg
Thanks, I've heard that about CD and DVD made at home.
Good advice.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
Optical-burn CDs degrade with time. While their life-time is long, it is not forever.
If you do put vital, historical, data on a CD, you also need a recycling program wherein the data on the CD is copied afresh to a new one.
Every three years, say, devote a day to refreshing your CD collection.
Commercial CDs don't have this problem in that they are not "burnt," they are created physically by mechanical pressing.
Some CDs are certainly better than others from the archival standpoint. Here's the article that's been my guideline on the subject for the past few years:
Tomsic
There were optical drives that were "archival", 100 year predicted lifetime. Unfortunately the drives themselves were only around for about 5 years. I had 2 good drives and 2 boxes of blank media I couldn't give away last year
Try a Viagra.
hell if it's 8" floppy, all he needs is a tongue depressor and some duct tape.
But, make sure you're married to a floppy drive. No sense having a hard drive all alone.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
Try a Viagra.
I had a programmer that worked for me that could do things with batch files that were astounding. We were having trouble at an installation run by a data tyrant who was always making changes that would screw up our software. This kid wrote batch files that scanned the network each day and created an "image" of the system through directory commands, piping, etc. The next time it was run, it would compare the last snapshot with the current one, revealing which files had changed. That gave us some excellent ammo to confront the data manager. "I see you changed so-and-so. Why?" After enough of that, he stopped screwing with us.
I've saved a notebook of all the batch files this guy wrote because they were so amazing. The DOS batchfile language was enormously powerful, although 99% of the people that used batch files never got past anything more simple than a serial list of commands to execute.
I miss it in the sense that you could tell right away whether someone knew what they were doing based on how well they could navigate around from the C:> prompt. Now, they can just click around and *look* like they know what they're doing. About the same as the switch from manual to automatic cameras.
-- Bobby G.
It's been my experience that the floppy drive doesn't work as well after the wedding as it did before. Personally, I'd never buy another floppy drive...I'd just lease one when I needed it.
Old disks collect dust - the heads in the drive need to be manually cleaned quite often when dealing with old media (and if it's really bad then it can be worth removing the magnetic disk from the protective jacket, cleaning it, then reassembling).
Newer (as in 1990s or even more recent) 3.5" HD media was also often junk
- I think QC started to go to hell as floppy use died out and media companies started cutting corners and producing a sub-standard product.
I've read thousands of disks, though - even stuff from the very early 80s typically holds up well. 5.25" disks from Parrot and Wabash seem to be the main exception - the binder which sticks the magnetic coating to the plastic substrate seems to fail on those more often than on disks from other vendors; typical behavior is a screech from the drive as the coating parts company with the disk, sometimes followed by a crunch as the drive heads part company with the drive :-/
[always looking for vintage systems / parts, incidentally - chopping the 'moo' out of my email address should reach me]cheers
Jules
Floppy disk go bad with age. I wouldn't be surprised they already are.
Jimmie
I can imagine, that's probably true.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
Floppy disk go bad with age. I wouldn't be surprised they already are.
Jimmie
I'm rebuilding an older pc using a new sata hard drive and WinXP. Sata drives came out after XP did, so at one point during the install you need to insert a floppy with the sata drivers. I tried slipstreaming the drivers onto a new install disc, which usually works, but not in this case. So I wish I'd kept a couple of floppies, instead of destroying all of mine - but I'm asking around and somebody will find one or two to give me for this project.
That is unusual, did you also slipstream service pack 3? It has built-in SATA drivers that work on common motherboards and SATA drives. Of course you may have an odd one as you did say that it was an old PC.
The 'network install' of service pack 3 is still available at Microsoft. I found that 'Nlite' is by far the easiest tool to use for slip streaming.
I did this a year ago and also found a pack of SATA drivers that I had intended to use in a worst case scenario but there was no need as SP3 did the trick.
John
I'm guessing that you will find several people willing to donate a couple floppies to your worth while cause. Maybe I should hang onto a couple, for old time sake. Lest auld that data be forgot, in the days of auld lang syne.
Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
I'm rebuilding an older pc using a new sata hard drive and WinXP. Sata drives came out after XP did, so at one point during the install you need to insert a floppy with the sata drivers. I tried slipstreaming the drivers onto a new install disc, which usually works, but not in this case. So I wish I'd kept a couple of floppies, instead of destroying all of mine - but I'm asking around and somebody will find one or two to give me for this project.
Burn the SATA drivers on a CD.
Hi, I keep USB external FDD for such an occasion. Some times driver(even with packing) is too big to go onto FD. You have to collect all the drivers you need and burn it on CD/DVD using another machine to finish installing XP. I play with Busy Box, JTAG, serial console, things like that to revive bricked routers for fun. XP or Linux works well in this kind of work.
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