China DOS Union

I have more than a dozen floppy disks with the 0 track damaged. Does anyone here have any way to bring them back to life

Try low-level formatting with HD-COPY~~~~~~~!

For the situation of hard disk sector 0 damage, it is relatively troublesome, but it is not completely hopeless - as long as the damaged sector 0 is shielded and sector 1 is used to replace sector 0. The ideal software to complete this work is PCTOOLS. Specifically, PCTOOS is a tool of DE. Select Drive in the main menu Select, then select Physical in the Drive type item, press the space bar to select it, then press the TAB key to switch to the Drives item, select HARD DISK, then OK, press Enter to return to the main menu, open the SELECT menu, then the PARTITION TABLE will appear, select and enter it to see the hard disk partition table information. This hard disk has two partitions. Find the C partition, which starts from cylinder 0 of the hard disk. Then change 0 of the BEGINNING CYLINDER of partition 1 to 1. Save and exit, restart the computer, press DEL to enter the COMS settings, perform "IDE AUTO DETECT" to let the BIOS re-detect the relevant parameters of the hard disk, save and exit, then re-partition and format the hard disk, and the hard disk can continue to be used. Note: After modifying the sector, only after formatting the hard disk will the partition table information be written to sector 1. I wonder if it works for floppy disks.

If you don't need the data, then don't rescue it. It will be more troublesome if you find it's bad when you use it.

There is a small software that, after resident in memory, blocks the bad zero track. I posted it a long time ago, but I haven't used it. I have dozens of floppy disks with bad zero tracks, and I've never thought about making them work again.

The first floppy disks I used were 5 yuan each, which was okay. Later, no matter whether I bought them at 5 yuan, 2.5 yuan, or 2 yuan, none could be used more than 50 times. All had bad track 0. I didn't repair them either. It's a pity I don't know if it's the floppy drive that's bad or the floppy disks that are bad.

NU8's DISKTOOL has this function, to regenerate floppy disks. However, it's very cumbersome to use. For floppy disks processed with it, you still need to use the HDD regeneration of NU8, and all the data inside is still there.

The method on the 3rd floor is simply absurd, I don't know who invented it, and it's repeatedly spread online. In fact, it's completely useless. Of course, the 3rd floor is also well-intentioned.

If the track 0 is bad, you can try changing several floppy drives, the purpose is just to save data. The head positions of each floppy drive are a bit different.

Ah~~! Floppy disk ah~~! If it's not to rescue data, it's suggested that you don't waste your effort. Now, floppy drives can be virtualized, directly connected to IMG files, how convenient. Why still need to use a floppy drive as a boot disk oh!!

Originally posted by fortry at 2006-2-14 11:52 PM:
Ah~~! Floppy disk~~! If it's not to rescue data, it's suggested that you don't waste your efforts. Now, floppy drives can be virtualized, directly connected to IMG files, which is so convenient. Why still need to use a floppy drive to make a boot disk @...

There are differences between virtual floppy disk booting and actual floppy disk booting, especially when the system can't be entered or there are viruses in the memory during system startup. At this time, a clean floppy disk is needed to boot (of course, USB flash drive, CD-ROM booting is also okay)

Floppy disks? It's better to be phased out. Use flash drives instead

The meaning is the same as dividing the hard disk with bad sectors into one partition!

Format the floppy disk to 750K with hd-copy, then format it to 1.44M to see if it can solve the problem. Floppy disks often have issues after being used for a period of time. In fact, many are soft issues. Formatting the floppy disk twice (that is, "low-level formatting" of the floppy disk) with hd-copy can solve many problems. If hd-copy can solve the problem, then use ndd to detect it, so that it is more reassuring to use.

I provide 4 methods:

1) Move a strong magnet back and forth near the floppy disk, then try format;

2) Carefully open the floppy disk, separate the diskette from the metal chip, reverse it and then stick it together in the original way, then reformat.

3) Try with debug commands:

Ⅰ. Enter debug

Ⅱ. Take a good disk with no damaged boot sector, insert it into the floppy drive

   -L 100 0 0 1

Ⅲ. Insert the damaged disk into the floppy drive

   -W 100 0 0 1

   -Q

Note: The capacities of the good disk and the bad disk must be the same

4) Use hd - copy to format the floppy disk to 750K, then format to 1.44M, generally it will be okay;

Generally, if it is not "scratched and moldy", the above 4 items can repair it.

[ Last edited by xjmxjm1234 on 2006-4-20 at 20:48 ]

Maybe PCTOOLS can be used to read and recover data, but forget about repairing the track 0 of a floppy disk