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From: tonyrich@titanic.cs.wisc.edu (Anthony Rich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Dead Floppies ?????
Message-ID: <1990Dec28.175440.10250@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 28 Dec 90 17:54:40 GMT
References: <1990Dec27.093000.3845@csc.anu.edu.au>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu (The News)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 22

Ida writes:

>   I had 7 floppies die in a day in the sense that after I 
> copied files off them and asked my HD drive to erase it, it says
> INITIALIZATION FAILED.  Last night, I tried FastFormatter 3.0 on them.
> It complains that it is having some problems and asks me whether
> I would like to continue.  I say yes and I seem to have my disk back.

Careful!  The floppy will mount on the desktop as though it were okay,
but the bad sectors are *still bad*.  When FastFormatter says it's "having
some problems", it's finding bad sectors.  If you press "Continue" it just
skips them and keeps formatting the good ones.  To *really* fix the floppy,
after using FastFormatter 3.0 and its "Continue" option, use a utility like
SUM Tuneup to lock out the bad sectors.

  -- Tony

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