Have a Panasonic JU-475 5.25" FDD as B: and it can read 360kb and read/write 1.2mb floppies okay. Have two boxes of new 5.25" which I cannot read or format. They are (1)POWER 525 MD-2d Dble Side Dble Den 40Track/48tpi which I presume are 360mb floppies (2)Sony MD-2HDA Dble Side High Den 1.6mb 96tpi 80track/side which I think are really 1.2mb floppies. Every time I put one of the above floppies into the drive I get the Abort Retry Fail message and all that works to get out of it is to put f and go back to C:. Several floppies from each box do this. Have a couple of other new boxes of no name floppies 96tpi 1.2mb Dble Sided High Den and can dir these okay. Any ideas on how to make the 2 boxes of floppies useable. My DOS books do not broach the subject nor do searchs unvail any clues.

Hi Well a few things may have happened. 1/ the quality of the magnetic material may not be up to the standard demanded 15 years ago. eg the material used in these brands may be like the stuff they try and flog off in the 3.5 diskettes today. (In my region, NEW diskettes -- I've found the Verbatim 95% plus diskettes are ok while other brands have been 50% or less ok. -- despite quality claims) If the quality of the media is down, any data written to the disk is slowly lost over months/years eg the preformatted disks are no longer preformatted. 2/ A growth can get onto the magnetic material and stop reading and writting to the diskette. This growth can be manually cleaned, but it requires the magnetic material to be removed from the carrier and cleaned using a cleaning solution. A growth can be idenified by turning the disc around and observing any distinct colour variation. You could try to use format to reformat the diskette. (BTW I am not familiar with pc dos) If you get a track zero error, you could try third party software. I don't know if you could find some suitable software for pc dos, that could format with track Zero bad.

First please check and advise if they are hard (many small holes) or soft (one small hole) sectored. To check the small hole(s) I refer to, turn the floppy itself and watch the hole in its cover near the centre. Are you using the FORMAT /F option correctly when formatting, as for 5.25" floppys their size is not detected automatically by the pc. Good luck - Keep us posted.

Thanks for the replies. anenefan. I examined all the floppies by turning them in their jackets and there is no color variation. The Sony floppies were still in their heat shrunk celephane which I broke open so I doubt there has been any growth on them.Spent a hour searching on Google "I don't know if you could find some suitable software for pc dos, that could format with track Zero bad." but no luck. Mike. Dont quite understand what you mean by your first two paragraphs. These comments apply to all three brands of floppies I have ie the Power525,Sony and the no name(which works okay). The 5.25" floppies are all very flexible and the jacket, looking down on it as it is loaded has the long oblong read hole. Each side of the edge near the read hole is two little half circle notches in the jacket edge. On the left hand end of the jacket is the write protect notch with no tape over it. On the left hand side of of the centre hole is another little hole near it in the jacket about 6mm in diameter. On turning the media I can see no holes in it. anenefan and Mike, as I explained in my post I cannot get to the command to try any format etc. With the C: prompt showing I put a floppy in the drive, type B: hit enter and get the Abort,Retry,Fail message.

Hi You have a soft sectored disks BTW, the hard sectored ones were used in old word processors and such and weren't used in pcs. Dos will know what floppy drive you have and the maximun copacity it is. Thus when it formats it does so at the maximum capacity 1.2 MB The response you are getting is the same as if you put a unformatted disk in. In dos from the c prompt, you would type if your 1.2M 5 1/4 drive was a: format a: (if B drive format b: ) It should then prompt you to place a disk in your drive and press ... [So command first and then put disk in when asked] Hopefully the disk are in good condition and you should have no problem. You are not getting a track zero error yet. If you do - you could try wiping the floppy with a large magnetic source and try formatting again. There used to be disk erasers but that was some time ago. Formatting with Track Zero bad::. Had a quick google, and it is not as effective as it used to be. Only found one for a 3 1/2 floppy, for dos had minor issues with W9x. I'll have to go through my old bookmarks on a cdr to track down a russian site that I'm moderately sure had such a formatter. [probably be next week though]

Sorry Anenefan, but you are mistaken. With 3.5" floppys, HD discs have another square hole in addition to that with the write protect slide. This is used by hardware and os to determine whether disc is DD or HD. Occasionally this falls down, as early pc's did not have detection and everything was formatted as DD. Then when trying to read the discs on a later pc with detection, the HD floppy could not be read unless the extra square hole is blocked off with black tape. The 5.25" have no such way of detecting their capacity. Farl - look at the disc cover. About a quarter inch out from the larger central hole is a small hole about 3/16" diameter. If you rotate the disc itself, you will see either one hole appear, which is normal and means the discs are for soft sectoring. If there are many holes (with one at a slighter different radius) this means the discs are for hardware sectoring. To format: DD= FORMAT B: /U /C /F:360 HD= FORMAT B: /U /C /F:1200 If you have tried to format a disc wrongly with the incorrect capacity, it can fail when you try to format correctly. The way to overcome is to break the disc, by switching off the pc just as formatting starts, but before it fails. If you have dos v6.2?, enter HELP FORMAT and much is explained. GOod luck - Keep us posted.

anenfan and Mike. Thanks for all the trouble you both went to with your replies. As you both suggested, did the format from the C: prompt and using Mike's commands on the different DD & HD floppies, I now have an extra 10 of each type formatted perfectly. Mike using instructions on hole both types are as you and anenfan suspected ie soft sectoring type. Sure learnt a lot about 5.25" floppies. The DOS 6.22 resource sure explained a lot.