Re: raw file system ?

oldman wrote:
Thanks, the actual message from the system was 'unable to complete
format'. I think my PC has gone loco, the last accessable floppy I
have is now no longer accessable by my drive A. I now have to live by
without floppies.

Ah, I think that clinches it. Your floppy drive has gone belly up for
whatever reason. If you really are attached to the whirrs and grinds of a
floppy they are real cheap these days; I've seen them for as low as $10 and
even Radio Shack carries them. Or ours here does anyway. For, I think,
$19.
If you decide it's worth changing though, first do this:
-- locate the power connector (4 thick wires usually), Disconnect it from
the drive and plug it back in.
-- locate the data cable; flat, probably grey cable. Disconnect it from
the drive and plug it back in, the repeat at the other end of the cable.
Reseating connectors is always one thing to do if you open your computer;
often it can solve the problems.

It's an easy change-out if you decide to try it. Since you seem to already
have what you need off your floppies though, I'd probably just forget it and
ignore the floppy drive. Switch the effort to being certain you have
everything backed up and archived for future needs.
FWIW, I have an old tower I keep around with two 3.5" and two 5 1/4"
drives in it, plus a SCSI CD r/w, for the sole purpose of transferring files
for folks. I even had one request to recover some hard-sectored floppies
once but I turned it down; no way anything on the disks they had would work
on anything today; they were all CP/M diskettes, it turned out, and they
didn't want to pay anything for the exchange <g>. I do a lot of gratis
work, but that was one step too far.

HTH
Pop`



oldman wrote:
Hi Bill,
I tried but didn't get very far, here's what happened.
I tried to prepare a new floppy to be the desination disk, it was
loaded and the usual response from the system is that the disk is
not formatted would you like to proceed which I did and the result
was that it cannot be formatted, I tried on a few blank floppies and
result is still the same. My floppy A drive cannot format a brand
new floppy.

Hmm, that's odd since it's not just one but a bunch of floppies.
What was the exact error message? If those floppies had two holes
in the top edge, one with a slider, they might be set to read-only,
in which case you wouldn't be able to format them. When the hole is
covered, the disk can be written to.
So, if there are two open holes, look for a little slider in one
of them and slide it down to cover the hole. It's blocking an LED
inside the drive that tells it the drive is OK to write to.
One easy thing to check, at least.
Another remote possiblity is that the disks you tried and failed
to format, are a bad production batch. Unusual but it doesn happen.
Now, it IS possible, if those floppies are very old, that there
just is not enough magnetic properties left on the disk surface to
be able to hold a format. But I'd expect that to show up during,
not before, the format operation.
I can say with confidence though, that MS OS can indeed format
floppies if they are installed.
Many computers no longer include floppy drives these days.

... Not satisfied I load the one and only useable floppy disk in
and I was able to access and update those files and documents in it
- conclusion my floppy A drive is alive and kicking.

That's good; it says that the LED in the drive AND the drive
mechanism is all working reasonably well.

I was not able to
try copy disk on my ancient floppy game disk. My assessment is that
after XP SP2 updates, changes made to the operation of floppies
resulted in rendering the system unable to format new floppies thus
accelerating the demise of floppies (I read somewhere that a major
UK computer store will in the near future stop stocking floppies).
Any assistance in temporarily prolonging the lives of my floppy
collections will be appreciated.

No, SP2 made no changes in the ability to format floppies; I have
formatted many of them on this XP Pro machine and others, too,
including a win2k and XP Home.
They ARE falling from favor and many places are finding dwindling
sales and are preparing to stop selling them, but the OS still
supports them. Again, I just popped the floppy I destroyed in
proving the "RAW" file message earlier into the drive, and it
formatted just fine. Then I grabbed new, never formatted floppie
and formatted it, too. One last possibility that just occurred to
me is that hte old floppy
might not be the proper density, dependign on just how old it is.
There are 90k 180k, 360k, and 1.44Meg floppies, even some slightly
larger with an FDFormat.

To "preserve" a floppy, you have to "refresh" or "rewrite" the
magnetic markings to the disc inside the plastic housing. You can
refresh a floppy by simply copying all of the files on it to your
PC, any folder of your choice, and THEN copy everything back to it.
For very old floppies, it would also be a good idea to Format
them before writing the information back to them. The Copy process
does not copy the sector markings on a floppy; only the data, while
Format rewrites all the sector markings and checks the disk for bad
sectors at the same time. I did a quick look for refresh.com, a
program that will do all that in
one step, but I can't find it. IF I think of it later I'll search my
archives for it and see what I can find. I do know now that it was
part of the old Norton V4 tools for MSDOS.

HTH
Pop`
--
Most people agree that if you have to go,
drowning in varnish provides
the best finish.





The (small) hope was that the copy process would succeed in
producing a disk that was error free. If you're able to read the
directory, it is not in
Raw.format.

"oldman" <oldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:FF681842-236D-4361-81E8-22114C3B92A0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The floppy disk drive works fine, the only problem was this
ancient RAW formatted disk that the system was unable to accept.
Isn't copying to another floppy disk (assume able to copy disk)
would require the floppy disk drive to accept RAW format (unless
when copying, the system will convert the resultant copy being in
a format acceptable by the system). Nevertheless I thank you for
the guidiance.
Thanks and regards

"Bill Blanton" wrote:

Try cleaning the hardware with a floppy disk head cleaner after
blowing it
out with compressed air.

If that doesn't work..try copying the floppy to another.
Right click (A:\)> Copy Disk...


"oldman" <oldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8C664DB2-9A11-4E7C-B584-513003693764@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have an ancient floppy -Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack
(Disk format: High-density(1.44MB) Version 1.0 which I tried to
load through my floppy drive A connected by USB to my PC
(XP+MCE). I scanned the floppy with AVG and was reported clean,
I than clicked Drive A for properties and noted that the disk
was formated under RAW. I next left clicked Drive A and the
directory of the floppy was displayed, I than left clicked
Setup and the problem ocurred, the system came back with an
error message that the floppy is to be formatted, I was never
able to get rid of this error message (my event viewer
indicated warning sfloppy event51 and error sfloppy event7) in
the end there was a stack of this error notifications and my PC
hung. I hope this will provide more information to Ken Blake
with the view to assist II -- oldman trying to understand
computers


"II" wrote:

what is raw file system and why my floppy disk was changed to
this system from fat file system without my knowledge making it
not useable?

i tried to format it by my pc does not allow it.



.

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