Re: Saving to Floppy Disk under OS/2

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from xywrite@xxxxxxxx Wed, 4 Mar 1998 00:59:55 -0500 (EST)

Try this:

Format a floppy on your OS/2 office machine. Launch XyWrite. Write a
file to the floppy. Close the file. Re-CAll the file. Alter it. Try
to SAve it (overwrite it) on the floppy.

If you do NOT get the "Unknown unit" error, then that is diagnostic and
we know we have a floppy|formatting|bad_install|floppy_drive
problem. If you DO get the error, then, well, why have we been
complicating the issue with talk of the home machine/pure DOS/etc?

I would not dismiss the possibility of incompatible formatting or bad
floppy drive too quickly. The floppy drive is the cheapest, least exact,
most grossly motion-intensive component of your hardware. Most of them
are crap. I have quite a few machines on my premises, and many of those
drives are only marginally compatible with my other floppy drives. I
fired up a brand new Fujitsu floppy drive two weeks ago, and it
failed right out of the box (read errors) -- but then suddenly started
working more reliably (98% maybe). On most floppyies, read errors are
fairly common. Media failure is _extremely_ common (wastebasket).

Anyway, try the above experiment. It narrows the focus. Do not omit the
formatting step!


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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