Text 22404, 45 rader
Skriven 2006-10-12 20:50:07 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 22376 av Charles Scaglione (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Vista RC2
=================
In article <24339$WIN95@JamNNTPd>,
 "Charles Scaglione -> JAY EMRIE" <cs@nomail.com> wrote:

 CS> On Wed, 11 Oct 2006 13:03:00 -0400, JAY EMRIE -> GERALD MILLER wrote:

 GM>>> The last time I tried to install WFWG 3.11 from my 3 1/2 disks, I
 CS>   found I
 GM>>> had one disk that was corrupted (they have been sitting around for so
 GM>>> long)...  Do you have lots of the AT&T OEM CDs?

 JE>> That should be taken as a warning by all that have 3 1/2" floppies.
 CS>   They
 JE>> OFTEN become unusable after an indeterminable length of time.

 CS> I've never had that problem with 3.5" floppies.  Now, having said that,
 CS> what I have experienced is using floppies originally formatted from a
 CS> older machine - say, in DOS, then trying to use them in a different
 CS> machine.

 CS> It wasn't because the data is corrupt from age but rather the different
 CS> alignment of the drives.  Additionally, there is a KB article by MS
 CS> describing problems reading older floppies with XP as the OS.

 CS> It may that Gerald's floppies containing WFWG 3.11 are all OK if
 CS> he could read them on an older machine.  Of course it is possible for the
 CS> floppy to have gotten damaged.

I have hundreds of recycled floppies at my school (a publisher who used
to include floppies with his books moved to CDs, and passed on 5,000
floppies with various sets of legal self-help software on them to me)...
I give them out to students whenever they request to take work back and
forth between school and home.

But I always warn them to keep another copy of their work-- we find 'the
computer ate my homework' with some regularity... the diskette, which
apparently worked at home is unreadable in another computer-- Windows
reports the diskette as unformatted.

Personally I now find floppies to be too unreliable to recommend their
use. If you only use them on a single computer, they may be usable-- but
if you need to use them to 'sneakernet' files between multiple
computers, they just can't be counted on.

--- MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.1 (Intel Mac OS X)
 * Origin: Ad Hoc (1:123/789.0)