Tip #4413 - Floppy Disk Maintenance
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Floppy
Disk Maintenance
Here's one for
those of you who still use floppy disks! As you probably know, after
awhile, floppies can become damaged or corrupted. That's especially
true if you don’t have a case or something to protect them with.
The shutter on the disk, along with the ribbon and some of the other
components, may become damaged, which can cause the disk to stop working
properly. It can also cause errors on the disk. Luckily, there are
some things you can do to see what's going on with your floppy disk
before it gets any worse.
The Disk Error
Check will check your floppy for errors, the Defragment feature will
make it easy and faster to access your files and the Formatting function
will help clear up some of your available space. By performing all
of these procedures on a regular basis, you will be able to get a
lot more life out of your floppy disk. Here's how!
Disk Error
Check
To check for errors
on one of your floppy disks, put it into your floppy disk drive and
double click on the My Computer icon on your desktop.
Once you get there, right click on the 3.5 Floppy (A:)
disk drive and select Properties. Click on the Tools
tab and then click Check Now.
A little window
will pop up with a few choices for you: "Check Disk 3.5
Floppy for Disk Options," "Check Both the
Automatically Fix File System Errors" and "Scan
for and Attempt Recovery of Bad Sector Boxes." Once
you've made your choice, just click the Start button.
There are four phases the disk checker goes through to give you complete
and accurate results.
Formatting
If you have a
new floppy disk that is showing up as a full disk or an older disk
and it has no available space, you need to reformat it. To do so,
go back to the 3.5 Floppy (A:) disk drive icon and
right click it. Next, go to Format and the Format
3.5 Floppy A: window will come up. You can leave everything
as it is, except for the Format Options. In that section, click Quick
Format and then press Start. A caution window
will come up, stating that reformatting the disk will erase all of
your data. Go ahead and click Yes or OK
to that. When the reformat is done, you will receive a Format
Complete window, telling you that the formatting process
is complete. Simply press OK to close it out.
Defragment
The Defragment
tools will make it easy and faster for you to access the files on
your floppy disk by rearranging them and saving the data in a color
coded method. Again, go back to the 3.5 Floppy (A:) disk
drive icon, right click on it and choose Properties.
Next, click the Tools tab and then click Defragment
Now. The Disk Defragmenter window will come
up for you. From there, click on the (A :) choice,
if it's not already selected. Then click on the Analyze
button and give it a few seconds to run through its scan. A report
will then come up for you and you can View, Print
or Save the results. The report will show
you the exact files and data that are going to be moved. Once you're
done looking over the results, click Close and on
the Disk Defragmenter window, click Defragment
After the Defragmentation process is done, a final report will come
up, showing you exactly how much space and files have been compressed.
You can either View, Print or Save
the results for future reference as well.
The next time
your floppy disk takes all day to pull up your files and data, it
shows a full disk that should have some available space or it appears
to be corrupt, try one these methods to get more out of your floppy
disk and correct the problem. I hope this has been helpful to you!
~ Tweety Dimes
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