On 04/07/13 17:11, Brian Miller wrote: > On Sun, 2013-04-07 at 16:43 -0400, mark wrote: >> On 04/07/13 16:22, Frank Cox wrote: >>> Floppy disks have a finite usable life. Depending on where and how you have >>> been storing them, they may be shot. >>> >> Yeah, but.... I tried three of 'em, three different OEM, and three ages, >> and they all give me fdisk saying it's not a valid block device. > > If they were all written with the same drive it's also possible the head > alignment had drifted which will make things...interesting. > > Try formatting a scratch floppy to see if you can write. If that works > but you still can't read, evidence that it's indeed an alignment > mismatch. These are many years of disks, written on many machines. At any rate, I just tried mformat a:, and it tells me that it can't open /dev/fd0: No such device or address. mark -- Though I don't think (object-oriented programming) has much to offer good programmers, except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to large organizations. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. - Paul Graham