I get this message:
fd: RECALIBRATE FAILED
each time I attempt to put a floppy disk in the drive of my NeXTstation TurboColor. I don't have any 2.88MB floppies, but I could have sworn that 1.44MB floppies worked with the NeXT machines, back in the day. The floppies are formatted as MS-DOS FAT16 floppies (or whatever Windows XP formats floppies as). I'm using NEXTSTEP 3.3.
Is there a way to re-format/initialize the floppy disks on NEXTSTEP, or is this an indication that the floppy drive is dead? It spins and acts like it's trying to read the disks.
In my experience, nextstations are very particular when it comes to the floppy disks. Once you find a disk "they like", things seem to go well. When I got my first nextstation, I did not have any new/virgin disks. I had to go through a stack of 20 floppies to find one I could successfully use to boot in order to install NS3.3 from CD. I would do a format (not a quicke windows one), and assuming that went ok write the image to the disk and try it in the nextstation. That disk has worked fine on many different systems, assuming the floppy drive was not DOA.
Chef
You know I wonder....
I'm just about ready to move offices here, and the one white box I've got (running EOF!) I thought I'd make another boot set of disks just incase...
I think I went through 30+ disks... It's like all the old media in this office over the last 10+ years have deteriorated to the point where they cannot hold a charge for more than a few minutes.......
It wouldn't surprise me if most floppies have in fact outlived their 'shelf life'.... Make hard disk copies of what you can find!.. Or it would seem of all the media I have access to, hard disks fail the least (but even they fail too)..
Quote from: "MauiBoy"I get this message:
fd: RECALIBRATE FAILED
I have seen this message on two faulty floppy drives.
That's what I'm wondering. I bought some new disks today and inserted them, with the same result. :( Oh well. Guess I'll see if I can just boot from CD.
I thought these floppy drives had the same "powered" eject that the old Macs had, which I always thought was cool. Anyone got a lead on some old NeXTstation TurboColor floppy drive that works?
Maybe I'll try blowing it out with a can of Dust-Off first.
The NeXT floppy drives are power eject too. From the ROM Monitor you can enter "ef" at the command prompt to have it spit out the disk.
The can of Dust-Off sounds like a good idea. Another thing to try is unplugging the floppy drive cable at both ends and reinstalling it to make sure it's seated all the way. A couple of replacement drive sources would be
Ron Fronberg on Ebay (
http://myworld.ebay.com/ronfronberg) as well as Blackhole, Inc. Ron sells brand new drives occasionally.