My Windows 10 PC has a 3.5" floppy drive, and I have a few old boxes of disks here. I want to to a full format and verify on the floppy disks to verify that they are good, and that the floppy drive is working OK.
Other than the built in formatter (does it verify?) are there any floppy disk testing programs out there that will work on a Window 10 or 7 machine?
Personally i would not trust floppies. they are not reliable. i would use a CD / DVD to store data, especially stuff i do not want to loose.
With the 3.5" floppies and wanting to check for data on them first be sure to open the switch to prevent inadvertently writing to them or formatting. When assured nothing is to be saved close that switch and format. A couple three versions back of Windows just inserting the disk in the drive caused issues and disabling the process prevented issues.
Floppies are small in capacity (1.44M), they are slow an not reliable.
On Dos era, I use to test the disk formatting with a surface test.
Format the drive and run chkdsk x: /r
I didnt think anyone even had floppy disks anymore, let alone a drive. If I were you, I would take everything important off those disks and erase them before getting rid of them.
They will be used on an Apple Quadra system, or Amiga or Atari ST. I just want to verify that they can still be used.
At this point I'm just using the Format command in a CMD window to format them.
As long as you don't use the /Q quick format option, then from the command line FORMAT should write zeros to every sector to test them. If you want a more thorough test, use the /P option to specify the number of passes to write.
(type FORMAT /? for more help)Code:/P:count Zero every sector on the volume. After that, the volume will be overwritten "count" times using a different random number each time. If "count" is zero, no additional overwrites are made after zeroing every sector. This switch is ignored when /Q is specified.
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