🚀 go-pugleaf

tan...@cyberport.com (Warren Young) wrote:

>ea...@wwa.com (the kumquat kuriosity) wrote:
>
>>Agreed. I've rubbed some high-powered magnets (not fridge magnets, but a
>>large metal jobber that can hold a full manilla folder to the file cabinet)
>>over an 800K floppy... did the scrub-scrub motion for about a minute or
>>two, and popped in the disk. fine.
>
>Well, guess what: I can't get the media to fail, either.  This
>wouldn't bother me if I hadn't lost so much data on floppies.  Grrrr.
>Well, we have a phone test box at work that will cause a phone to
>ring.  So, I'll take my old AT&T slimline phone (with mechanical bell)
>down and continue this.
>
>So, a question: what is it that will cause a disk to go bad in the
>five minutes it takes me to drive to work?  It sure as heck isn't
>magnetism.  :-/  I can't count the number of times I've gone home to
>grab something, put it on a floppy, drove to work, and couldn't read
>the disk.

Well, the obvious possibility is that your two drives are 'out of spec'
in opposite directions.  This could make the two drives unable to read
one another's disks.  Have you tried later re-reading the disk on your
home machine?  Have you tried it in a different machine at work.  

To keep this in the alt.folklore.computers vein, in the 'good old days',
when men were men and all good tape drives were NRZI, it was not
uncommon to find a tape which could be read ONLY on the tape drive which
created it.  This created quite a muddle when, in the course of a busy
night, the drives had been crosspatched on the fly to shift logical
assignments.

>
>= Warren -- http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent

---------------
Larry McKnight
(this space unintentionally left blank.....