reading floppy disks Dale Musselman 2007-04-26T22:03:06Z 2007-04-26T22:03:06Z

Yes, I think libraries almost always have these type of issues with floppies. And it seems they are often intermittent and inconsistent.<br /><br />Floppies are just a non&#045;reliable, very old technology, and I can&#039;t wait till they completely disappear.<br /><br />I think the best thing you can do is to make it as easy as possible for patrons to use flash drives, including offering some cheap ones for sale if that is an option for you.<br /><br />Dale

Dale Musselman 2007-04-26T22:03:06Z Wendell Gragg 2007-04-26T18:35:03Z 2007-04-26T18:35:03Z

That is hard because you have no control over the computer that wrote the floppy. The only thing I&#039;ve been able to do in the past was to try it on multiple computers and hope that one of the drives will be able to read it.<br /><br />If you have something like Norton Disk Doctor, you can see if it can recover anything.<br /><br />Wendell

Wendell Gragg 2007-04-26T18:35:03Z Ed Erjavek 2007-04-26T17:51:36Z 2007-04-26T17:51:36Z

We were curious if anyone has had any success dealing with a growing problem for us with patrons trying to have info read on their floppy disks.<br /><br /> <br /><br />It isn’t a question of the hardware on the floppy drive being bad as the sectors on the floppy disk not lining up.<br /><br /> <br /><br />The issue is likely that was the original computer that the patron’s document was saved on. The chances are best that the document will be able to read on the machine that it was originally created on.<br /><br /> <br /><br />When the patron tries to open that document on another machine, it may or may not be able to read that document because the heads on the floppy disk drive may or may not be able to read the sectors on the floppy disk because they don’t line up properly.<br /><br /> <br /><br />Does anyone out there have any ideas how to alleviate this problem?

Ed Erjavek 2007-04-26T17:51:36Z