On 11/4/2017 11:53 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

VanguardLH WROTE:

james wrote:

My bootable DOS floppy disk died. I had not used it in several years,
but wanted to boot up with the floppy to install a new harddrive on an
old Windows 98 machine, with no CD drive.

I have looked in several stores. None sell them anymore.

I found a 5pack on ebay, for $5 and bought them. That was the cheapest I
found for NEW ones. Some were ridiculously priced, and there were some
used ones selling cheap, and saying "no returns" "untested", etc. I'll
pass on those!!!

Then there was someone selling 20 dead 5.25 inch floppies for around
$29, plus $10 shipping. It said "For Art Projects".... (Apparently his
garbage can is full, and he really thinks he will find a sucker)....

Someone even had some 8" floppies. I heard of them, but never saw them.
That's got to be very old.

Anyhow, I am just curious if anyone has seen any floppies in any stores
lately.

Just curious, how much data did those 8" floppies hold? I have a
feeling they held less than the 360K 5.25 Inch.....

So it is top secret that only you know what size floppy you want.
Could be 3.5", 5.25", or 8". You only mentioned the 8" size
(Pelican) and those are far older than your XP computer.

It was fairly clear to me that his mention of the 8" ones was only that
he found someone selling some. I agree it's not clear whether he wanted
3½ or 5¼, though I think the former since he mentions the latter only re
the art-seller.

Except I don't remember any PC-XT in 1982 or later "PCs" having an
internal 8" floppy drive. Those were externally attached drives on PCs.
They did come with 5.25" internal drives. There may be custom setups
that had 8" drives as internal, like the old IBM 360 mainframes that
used an 8" floppy for the IPL (inital program load) but I severely doubt
the OP is running Windows XP on that setup. I don't recall what was the
minimum hardware requirement for Windows XP but I don't think an old
8088 even with a Nec V20 coprocessor was acceptable to the XP installer.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...rating-systems

That probably excludes any old consumer-grade PC that had an internal 8"
floppy. The OP never actually mentioned the floppy drive was internal
(attached to mobo controller or daughtercard) or external (via parallel,
serial, USB, or other hardware protocol interface).

http://preview.tinyurl.com/y92odc83
Change "3.5" to whatever size you need. The price is high because of
the prolonged storage costs for ancient media. You're trying to
acquire a portion of a very limited inventory.

(Note: VanguardLH is just saying "use Google", but hiding that by using
tinyurl. Above is _not_ a link to a specifc vendor. Thinking it was, I
followed it, thinking 'I bet they don't have 3" ones' [as opposed to
3½], but of course I couldn't. [3" was a - IMO, superior, for mechanical
reasons - format that came out about the same time the 3½" one did, but
never caught on, presumably as it must have cost more to make.])

It's Froogle, or Google's Shopping search. I did a search on 3.5"
floppies and found some sellers. No, doesn't look like they are cheap.

The Google search URL is ridiculously long hence the use of a short
redirection URL; however, unlike other redirection services, TinyURL
lets me specify the preview hostname so users can see to where the URL
points BEFORE they get pushed to there.

All magnetic media incurs dipole stress which means it loses
retentivity over time. The dipoles are no longer perpendicular and
the less they are the weaker becomes the bits. That's why all
magnetic media requires refreshing, especially for those areas that
never change (only read,

Though true that magnetic media lose retentivity over time (so should be
refreshed/copied), I'm not sure they all involve _perpendicular_
dipoles; certainly linear recording tape doesn't, and I don't _think_
floppies do. I think most HD technologies do.

1 bits are those dipoles perpendicular to the reading direction. Over
time due to dipole stress (magnetic relaxation), the dipole field
becomes less than perpendicular until completely relaxed and
indistinguishable as a differentiation as a 1 bit. Even zeroes must be
stressed (written) to provide differentiation. The less the
differentiation (the more relaxed the dipole) the less likely the media
provides reliable distinction between of bit state.

I'm not discussing whether the media uses longtitudinal or perpendicular
recording regarding the physical media and the sensor head. Sorry,
perpendicular was incorrect as often I see the dipoles are 180 degrees
differentiated regardless of recording direction. In old HDDs, the
dipoles were arranged longitudinally (horizontal and parallel to the
platter surface) but changed to perpendicular recording to increase
density. However, the 1 and 0 dipoles are opposite of each other (180
degrees, not perpendicular as I said) to provide differentiation between
those states. I don't recall what floppies used for magnetic recording
orientation. I think tape had the dipoles perpendicular to the
direction of the tape movement but I'd have to check.

Also, without a change in the recording material, going to higher
density means less material (grains) of magnetic material used for a
dipole (or magnetic domain). The whole point was that magnetic media
that sits around un-refreshed will lose retentivity of its data.
Magnetic material can resist self-demagnetization but not stop it. My
recollection is that tape was better than floppies for archival storage.

I've seen companies that stored archival data on floppies even under
excellent environmental conditions but still lose data (but those using
tape did not). That was long ago where they learned the hard way that
floppies are not for archival storage. One company where I was the
software librarian (just one of many duties in a hydra job) would store
HDDs with the OS, software product version(s), and all support software
to archive the product. Periodically I also had to order, test, and
archive an entire PC with the HDDs to make sure the technology was still
available some 20 to 40 years later. This was to make sure the product
could be reproduced or tested again under the same conditions as for a
customer using an old product on an old OS on old hardware. There were
some customers still using 30-old versions of the enterprise software.
If they pay for support then they get it but we needed to ensure we
could oblige. I think the oldest stuff involved mortgages because that
data and software to use it has to be around for 40 years by law.

The OP really needs to test if the drive is bad or just the floppy
(whatever size). Presumably if he has one diskette then he has some
more he can use for testing. They were mechanical drives and I remember
running into a few that get out of alignment. In fact, a floppy that
was formatted and read/wrote just fine in one computer was unusable in
another computer with the same type of drive. One of the drives was out
of alignment. No idea if the boot floppy the OP has was created using
the drive in the computer he is trying to boot or written using a drive
in a different computer.

one of the frequently encountered failures happens when 'cat hair'
gets on the head rails. Calibration steps it to the end and references
from there. The cat hair moved it off track.