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Floppy diskettes - a few questions

Subject: Floppy diskettes - a few questions
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 18:04:25 -0800
Greetings all -

I'm investigating a few Windows floppies. The floppies were reported as having gotten too close to a magnet.

This does not appear to be the case, but I'm trying to work out a few things.

Firstly, one of the floppies has no Volume Boot Record, or FATs. It just showed up as unallocated drive space, but files were recoverable in this space. What I'm trying do determine, is how it could end up in this condition? I haven't been able to reproduce it by "normal user" means - reformats, deletions, etc. all end up with at least FATs on the disk.

I'm testing some magnet trashed diskettes, but I'm expecting that the results will be different from the above.

Secondly, any suggestions for good info on formatting? I recall reading on this list that formatting doesn't write to the data area, at least for HDDs. Certainly my test showed, as I expected, a quick format of a floppy leaves the data intact. A standard format (in XP) did seem to wipe the data area, however - all f6 or 00 in hex.

Thanks.

Michael Edwards
Blank & Associates P.S. - 206.256.9699 x36
2001 Western Avenue, Suite 250 - Seattle, Washington 98121



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