Floppy Disks

What is a floppy disk??

Floppy disks, often called diskettes or simply disks, are a portable or removable strong media. They are used to store and transport word processing, spreadsheet, and other types of files. Floppy disks are also called floppies because the plastic disk inside the diskette covers is flexible, not rigid. There are several different types of floppy disks; 3.5 inch floppy disks, zip disks, super disks, hifd disks. Floppy disks are inserted into a floppy disk drive, a device that holds, spins, read data from, and write Data TO A FLOPPY DISK. Read means that the data in secondary storage is converted to electronic signals and a copy of that data is transmitted to the computer’s memory (RAM). Write means that a copy of the electronic information processed by the computer is transferred to secondary storage.

Floppy disks have a  write-protect notch, which allows you to prevent a diskette from being written to. To write-protect, use your thumb nail to move the small sliding tab on the lower right side of the disk (viewed from the back), thereby uncovering the square hole. 

On the diskette, data is recorded in concentric circles called tracks. Each track is divided into sectors, invisible wedge shaped sections used for storage reference purposes. Thus data is recorded on  tracks and sectors. 

Three factors determine how much data a given floppy can store, its number of sides, density and format. The capacity of each disk is limited.

DENSITY OF FLOPPY DISKETTE

Floppy disks are removable storage media. The density of a floppy diskette is determined by the amount or volume of it data it can store. Today’s standard is 1.44mb and typically labelled 2HD, which means “two-sided, high-density and can store 1.44 megabytes. The equivalent of 400 type written pages tomorrow’s might be a zip, super disk, or HiFD.

FORMATTING FLOPPY DISKS

Freshly purchased disks have to be prepared or formatted first before they can be used to store any program or data. This process of preparing the disk is called “formatting”. It is during the formatting that the disk storage area is divided into sections (tracks and sectors) electronically. You can equally format an old disk the data on which has become corrupted. If the disk has not been physically damaged, formatting the disk can reclaim all its storage space. However, before this is done it is essential to copy as mmany as possible of the files to other disks, because formatting a disk wipes it clean of any stored data. Formatting a disk is an MS-DOS function. However, different operating systems format disk differently. One operating system cannot read a disk formatted by another.

To format a new disk in DOS, the following steps are necessary.

1.  At the DOS prompt-C:/> type A: and press <Enter>,  the system will display A:/>

2.  At A:/> type FORMAT A:  and press <enter>, the system will be display on the screen “insert diskette to format”.

3.  Insert the new diskette into drive A and press <Enter>; now the system will start checking existing disk format and verifying the size of the disk and finally display the following message on the screen:

Format Complete 

NNNN Bytes Of Disks Space

NNNN Bytes Available On Disk

Format Another Disk (Y/N)?

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