UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

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Chapter 5—Floppy, Removable, Tape, and Flash Storage
Table 5.4 Handling Floppy Drive Error Messages Continued
Error Message Cause Solution
General Failure The disk is not formatted Reformat the disk and retest.
Reading Drive A, or has been formatted for
Abort, Retry, Fail, a different operating system
or Disk Error 31 (Macintosh, for example).
Damaged areas on the Replace the disk and retest. Use
disk medium. Norton Utilities or SpinRite to
recover data from disk.
Disk not seated properly Remove and reinsert in drive. Try
in drive. holding disk in place with your
hand. If you can read the data,
copy it to a reliable disk.
Access Denied You are trying to write Move the write-protect switch to
to a write-protected disk allow writing on the disk, or
or file. remove the read-only file attribute
from the file(s). File attributes can
be changed by the ATTRIB command
or through the file properties
in Windows.
Insufficient Disk The disk is filled, or the Check to see if sufficient free space
Space or Disk Full root directory is filled. is available on the disk for your
intended operation. Use folders
on the disk to store files, or change
to a new disk.
Bytes in Bad Displayed after FORMAT, Operating system will not use bad
Sectors CHKDSK, or SCANDISK if sectors, but this is a sign of a
(greater than 0) allocation units (clusters) marginal disk; reformat or discard
have been marked bad. and use a new disk with no bad
sectors.
Disk Type or You are attempting to Disks can be copied only between
Drive Type DISKCOPY between two drives using the same disk density
Incompatible incompatible drive and size. Use COPY or XCOPY unless
or Bad disk types. you are trying to create an exact
copy.
Removable Storage Drives
For backup or alternative main storage, many users today are deemphasizing
floppy disks in favor of alternative storage media.
Table 5.5 describes the varying types of storage media, and Table
5.6 provides an overview of storage types. Of the drives listed, only
the LS120/SuperDisk, Sony HiFD, and Caleb it drives are also
read/write compatible with standard 3 1/2-inch floppy media.
Drives that use SCSI or IDE (ATAPI) interfaces are installed the same
way as other SCSI or IDE devices. Refer to Chapter 4, “SCSI and IDE
Hard Drives and Optical Drives,” for details.