Q I have a large number of 3.5-inch diskettes—almost all of which appear to be defective! I don’t see how this is possible, but recently when I needed to back up some log files on my station PC I kept getting “defective disk” messages. I’ve been storing the disks properly, and I haven’t exposed them to magnetic fields. Do you have any idea what might be causing this?
A If you have been carefully storing your diskettes, there is one culprit you may have overlooked: your disk drive. The Doctor is willing to bet that you have a flaky 3.5-inch drive. The read/write head could be dirty, or the tracking mechanism could be faulty. These drives are so inexpensive (less than $20 in some stores), I’d suggest replacing the drive entirely. If that isn’t the problem, hang onto to your receipt and take the drive back. By the way, consider adding a CD-R or CD-RW drive to your station computer. It is much easier to do backups when you can dump 650 Mbytes of data at a time! The CD-ROMs are more durable and reliable than diskettes, too.
From QST April 2000
