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From: kmcvay@oneb.wimsey.bc.ca (Ken McVay)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: HP Vectra: Floppy failure
Summary: Floppy drive boot track failure - replace drive?
Keywords: HP Vectra
Message-ID: <1991May24.182001.25703@oneb.wimsey.bc.ca>
Date: 24 May 91 18:20:01 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: 1B Systems Management Limited
Lines: 31

I have an HP Vectra 286 that's about 4 years' old... the floppy disk
can no longer format diskettes.

The errors first showed up when the command 'format a:/s' was used.
The system would appear to format the disk, and verify it, giving the
available space, and the space taken by the system files. 'DIR', however,
would show that the original files on the floppy were still there - i.e.
no format took place.

After trying this several times, I clean the drive with a cleaning disk
and alcohol. The result was that I now receive "write-protect" violation
errors instead of the results described above.

PCTools offers the same errors.

Prior to the cleaning, various utilities would tell me that the first two
tracks on the diskette were unavailable.

It won't cost much to replace the drive, but I want to make sure the
disk is the problem, as opposed to the controller.

Can anyone offer any suggestions about what I might do to check this, or
offer other advice? I tried using another controller, but the Vectra
controller includes a parallel and serial port, and the system won't
boot without them, so that got me exactly no-where :-(


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