Floppy Disc!!

[sleepincutie]

I recently took a floppy disc to school with a whole coursework presentation on it ready to load up on a school laptop. My friend and I had both saved half of the presentation on the disc off both of our home computers. When we got the disc to school we got a message telling us that our disc had not been formatted and so we could not open it, but if im correct formatting means to clear a whole disc? It was rather irritating that the disc had worked on both our computers fine but after documents had been saved it failed to open! Any chance of an explanation to prevent us from dissappointing our teacher again? Muchos Love Answerbank Groupies x x x

[SidG]

Aah, the old floppy trouble. The ground reality, they are highly unreliable and non-durable primarily because they work in a manner similar to the audio cassettes i.e. the read/write head touching the disk surface thereby 'scraping' off the magnetics and hence getting corrupted unpredictably.

The best bet:
1 - FORMAT the disk before each use (not quick format, but complete format)
2 - Cross check by opening the document directly from the disk to make sure it is still working
3 - Make a backup on another disk just in case
4 - Pray it works

--- hope this helps

xxx

[fo3nix]

as Sid said, floppy's are known for doing this from time to time.

my solution would be to invest in a cheap flash drive:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?actio n=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=88347

that particular one stores about 170 times as much as a single floppy too. and best of all, they fail far less frequently than floppys do.

[potterfan3]

fo3nix is right, get a memory stick.