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From: russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Dead floppies
Message-ID: <1990Dec21.191001.1918@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 90 19:10:01 GMT
References: <10547@ilog.UUCP> <1990Dec21.161038.11141@sarah.albany.edu>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Lines: 32

In article <1990Dec21.161038.11141@sarah.albany.edu> derek@leah.albany.edu (Cinderella Man) writes:
>In article <10547@ilog.UUCP> skyvingt@ilog.UUCP (William Skyvington) writes:
>>The rate at which my floppies have been dying over the last year,
>>since I've been working on several IIcx machines, is outrageous.
>
>     I too have been encountering FAR more unreadable floppies over
>the past year or so, both 800K and 1.4MB.  I can state this objectively
>because I'm the person Mac users campuswide come to with their problems,
>and the number of trashed disks has been increasing slowly but steadily.
>This is machine-independent:  SE, IIcx, IIci, IIfx, all are about equal.
>
>
>>Frankly, I've reached the point at which I've lost all confidence in
>>Macintosh floppies.

Could this just be floppy AGE?  Especially with the 800K floppies?  (I've
never had confidence in the 1.44MB ones).  Floppies don't last forever, and
if a large number of floppies were purchased at about the same time, and
are used about as often, you will see them all start failing at once (had this
start happening a year ago with some of my oldest 800K floppies).

>     By the way, my working hypothesis is that it's the library door
>scanners producing a large enough field to scramble data.  It's the
>most common point we all walk through.  And I keep my disks free of dust,
>so it's not simple media scratches.

Seems unlikely-- I've seen disks placed in big tape degaussers, and that
doesn't seem to affect them.  I've also tryed to erase them by holding them
over speakers, etc, unsuccessfully.
--
Matthew T. Russotto	russotto@eng.umd.edu	russotto@wam.umd.edu
     .sig under construction, like the rest of this campus.