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From: smithc@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (Christopher A. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Unusable Floppy Diskettes
Message-ID: <1991Jan23.020416.28411@acc.stolaf.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 91 02:04:16 GMT
Sender: news@acc.stolaf.edu
Reply-To: smithc@thor.acc.stolaf.edu ()
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Organization: St. Olaf College; Northfield, MN
Lines: 26

I've been encountering a very frustrating problem on my Mac SE 
recently, and I can't quite figure out what is causing it.  In the 
past couple of days I've come across about ten disks that have 
something like bad sectors on them.  I did try to reformat them, 
since I needed the blank disks and the files were of no use to me 
anymore, but after several attempts at each the computer rejected 
each disk, saying "Initialization failed!"  In the past year or so 
I've lost about 20 to 30 disks to this menace.  To me that doesn't 
seem quite right since no one else I know with a Mac has had the same 
problem.

What exactly would be responsible for so many floppies being 
destroyed?  Could it be a drive (two, actually) that are out of 
alignment (that was a common problem on older computers, so I'm 
told), or could I have been rather unfortunate to come across a batch 
of bad disks with corrupted media?

Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated!  Please 
respond via Internet, and if anyone is interested I'll put up a 
summary of the responses.

Thanks,

Christopher A. Smith
St. Olaf College
INTERNET:  smithc@thor.acc.stolaf.edu