Hi Listemembers,
I find many floppies written on Win95 system are not readable on WinNT4.0(service pack 3.0) with NTFS. Why? Can anyone help?
Many Thanks

Pravin Fatnani

 

I believe the only file system available on a floppy is FAT. NT has problems with FAT32. Most likely cause is physical misalignment in the
floppy disk drives which would require replacement.

Pete

 

What format or formats you use for NT (NTFS and / or FAT16 and / or FAT32 [NT5 or NT4 with 3rd-party extensions]) is irrelevant.

Look for a problem with the drive itself. Floppy diskette reading between machines has always been a problem. Consider:

(a) Physical differences in the drive.
(b) Concrete dust (very acidic).
(c) Dirt in general -- clean the drive(s).
(d) Bad or old floppy diskettes (they have a finite life and should not be kept for more than a couple of years).
(e) Old drive.

Also you may wish to consider either a network, LapLink or some of the built-in data sharing options within Windows.

Do not expect a ZIP drive to solve all your problems, not all ZIP disks written by some ZIP drives can be read in other ZIP drives.

RJ

Ranjan Acharya 905-634-0844 x 238 (V)
Team Leader - Systems Group 905-634-9548 (F)
Grantek Control Systems http://www.grantek.com/
[email protected]
[email protected]

 

I have found that winnt will read floppies written by win95, but win95 will not always read floppies written by winnt.

One client had a Winnt system that would reliably read the Win95 written floppies, and could then write to them, but when I tried to read them on my
laptop (Win95) sometimes (maybe 20% of the time) it claimed they were not formatted. Putting them back in the WinNT machine would give me the same
error message. An attempt to format the floppy always resulted in an error that the disk was damaged once I received this error message.

Go figure.

 

Don't forget thet Microsoft fudged the FAT format to support long filenames with win95. This doesn't mean that NT shouldn't be able to read the table, it will just have the filenames end with % symbols.

Darryl Palmer
Cleveland State University

 

Long File Names or LFN's are probably not the culprit here. FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS all support the use of long filenames on Win9X and WinNT. Again, if you want FAT32 with WinNT4 then you have to purchase add-on software or wait for NT5/2000 (or NTFS with Win9X).

Long filenames on FAT partitions are made up of the 8.3 filename alias (short filename -- first six characters plus a tilde ~ [no % symbol] and
then a number) for compatibility with applications that do not support LFN's (for example, you run an old PLC ladder programme on your laptop and retrieve a directory of files). The 8.3 directory entry is then linked with a chain of secondary entries (13 characters at a time) that contains the long filename (these entries are invisible to non-LFN aware programmes). For example, an old version of DOS would see MYDOCU~1.TXT whereas Win9X and WinNT would see "My Document File.txt". LFN entries can be easily nuked by utilities that are not LFN aware.

As a first aside, note that NTFS file names are case sensitive whereas FAT 8.3 filenames are in uppercase (therefore a file called my.txt under FAT will generate an alias MY.TXT because of the lowercase name).

As a second aside, NTFS automatically generates the 8.3 alias but FAT16 does not necessarily have to. The default for FAT is to generate them, change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\Win31FileSystem to 1 for FAT partitions on your machine. Use DIR /X from a DOS box to view full 8.3 data (if available).

However, whether or not you can read the data from Windows NT or Windows 9X really has nothing to do with LFNs. We have lots of machines -- DOS, Win16, WinNT, Win9X and the only problem with floppy-interchangeability we have observed is between the physical machine rather than the OS. Not to say that there is a subtle difference that is caused by the OS.

RJ

Ranjan Acharya 905-634-0844 x 238 (V)
Team Leader - Systems Group 905-634-9548 (F)
Grantek Control Systems http://www.grantek.com/
[email protected]
[email protected]

 

Very true, exactly the same sequence was observed at this end but with the difference that floppies readable on on Win95 systems are not readable on
WinNT systems.

Pravin