Quote:
Originally Posted by Malakie
Hi,
Is there an Amiga program that can actually format a floppy and mark out bad sectors? Something that would allow use of at least the good parts of a floppy disk?
Since I recently got back into the Amiga finally, I am finding that floppy disks are impossible to find. I have a dozen or so older disks, including a couple game disks I won't play that are standard format (Earl Weaver stats disk for example) but they too have a sector error thus I am unable to complete a format.
Like an HD, I am wondering if anyone knows of a format program for floppy that actually marks out the bad sectors?
While I also have a gotek drive, I need floppy disks for a few things that I need to use on another Amiga that is a stock machine and I am not altering in any manner.
Any help is appreciated!
|
You can't mark out bad sectors on Amiga floppies because of the way the hardware works.
You can't read just an individual sector, you need to read in the track on one side that contains 11 sectors, and then access those sectors individually from there.
Obviously the problem is, if a sector is bad, the entire track on that side of the disk is bad as it won't be able to decode the track properly for you to be able to identify the particular sector, as 1 bad sector means the checksumming will fail.
If the disk is bad in any way, its time to send it to an early grave, its only going to get worse, not better.