Super Disk Formatter Download ((FREE))
Glenda Cavicchia
The SuperDisk LS-120 is a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 90 mm (3.5 in), 1.44 MB floppy disk. The SuperDisk hardware was created by 3M's storage products group Imation in 1997, with manufacturing chiefly by Matsushita.
The SuperDisk had little success in North America; with Compaq, Gateway and Dell being three of only a few OEMs who supported it. It was more successful in Asia and Australia, where the second-generation SuperDisk LS-240 drive and disk was released. SuperDisk worldwide ceased manufacturing in 2003.
The design of the SuperDisk system came from an early 1990s project at Iomega. It is one of the last examples of floptical technology, where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head which is much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives. Iomega orphaned the project around the time they decided to release the Zip drive in 1994. The idea eventually ended up at 3M, where the concept was refined and the design was licensed to established floppy drive makers Matsushita and Mitsubishi. Other companies involved in the development of SuperDisk include Compaq and OR Technology.
The SuperDisk's format was designed to supersede the floppy disk with its higher-capacity media that imitated the ubiquitous format with its own 120 MB (and later 240 MB) disk storage while the SuperDisk drive itself was backwards compatible with 1.44 MB and 720 KB floppy formats (MFM). Superdisk drives read and write faster to these sorts of disks than conventional 1.44 MB or 720 KB floppy drives.
Macintosh users found trouble making SuperDisk drives work with the GCR 800 KB or 400 KB diskettes used by older Macintoshes. These disks could be used in a SuperDisk drive only if formatted to PC 720 KB MFM format. Note that almost no other USB floppy drives supported Mac GCR floppies.
The biggest hurdle standing in the way of success was that Iomega's Zip drive had been out for three years when SuperDisk had been released. Zip had enough popularity to leave the public mostly uninterested in SuperDisk, despite its superior design and its compatibility with the standard floppy disk.
By 2000, the entire removable magnetic disk category was finally obsoleted by the falling prices of CD-R and CD-RW drives, and later on solid-state (USB flash drives or USB keydrives). Over the next few years, SuperDisk was quietly discontinued, even in areas where it was popular. Today, disks are very hard to find.
Under Windows XP, a USB SuperDisk drive will appear as a 3.5" floppy disk drive, receiving either the drive letter A: (if there is no floppy in the machine) or B: (if there already is one). This enables use by software that expects a floppy drive when 1.44 MB or 720 KB disks are inserted. 120 MB and 240 MB disks are also accessed via A: or B:.[5]
The linked article applies to all versions of Windows 10. The change to formatting a disk applies to all methods of formatting a disk with the built-in tools contained within Windows. This is the case since all four methods are running the same underline mechanic to format a disk.
I have a USB flash drive, which I may have mucked up, so I used DISKPART's CLEAN to clean it up. I created a simple volume, and tried to format it. (This is all using Windows' disk management.) I was told The system cannot find the file specified.
This wiped the partition table completely, and on new insertion on windows, it was able to do a standard format. I clued in that it had something to do with the partition table, since windows disk manager showed the old partition layout after attempting to create a volume+format, despite the fact that I'd picked a different volume and file system size (i.e. attempting to create a 4G volume and filesystem restored the previous 2G partition in the disk manager display, despite starting from a non-partitioned state).
I was unable to format a 32GB USB stick using tools from either Ubuntu, win8 disk manager or diskpart, after my son formatted it for a Linux Anaconda boot device. Fix was to use diskpart-list disk-select disk-delete partition override and finally CLEAN. This removed underlying attributes and I was able to create a new primary partition and format as NTFS again!
I recommend using Mark Tomlin's answer at Recovering a Partially Formatted USB Thumb Drive. If that doesn't work, try then using diskpart to clean the disk again and convert to GPT. The conversion to GPT seems to restore the USB drive to a usable state, which convert to MBR does not always manage. You should now be able to create a primary partition and format it. I then had a little difficulty in converting back to MBR, but managed it OK as explained in my answer on the other post. I hope that this helps.
UNetbootin can create a bootable Live USB drive, or it can make a "frugal install" on your local hard disk if you don't have a USB drive. It loads distributions either by downloading a ISO (CD image) files for you, or by using an ISO file you've already downloaded.
What works for me is trying different slots until it recognizes it and then trying the diskpart method.But if it doesn't work I use EaseUS Partition Master and then it does.This can often happen after making a boot disk with TransMac.
If that doesn't help, there is still the possibility to wipe the complete disk - after overwriting the first few megabytes the HDD will be recognized as fresh new HDD by Windows.You can do that for example using DBAN but don't forget to disconnect all the other HDDs before using it - otherwise you may delete the wrong HDD and lose all your data.
Press SHIFT-F10 or hit 'repair' in from the Windows installation to open up the command line, then execute the diskpart command and delete the partition, e.g.: list disk, select disk 0 or any other identifying the correct disk, list partition, select partition 1, or the encrypted one , in case there are multiple partitions, then delete partition override.
For those wiping a disk or memory card with Linux, I can confirm that wiping the first 4 MB and creating a new fat32 filesystem worked fine for me for an SD card used in a Windows phone. (The SD card was no longer available after a device reset.) No need to delete partitions. (Not sure whether the phone would even accept an SD card without partition.)
Does anyone have ready access to any software that might let me COMPLETELY low-level format a floppy to see if I can recover the physical disk for use? Like, the ability to write a brand new track 1 sector index marker, etc.
I am also not opposed to finding a really strong magnet to pass over the floppies to see if that will get them to format. Right now, the problem disks just keep getting kicked out as "failed to format floppy" within Windows 95/98. And Windows 10 doesn't even give me the option to low-level format - only quick format. I HAVE been unchecking that box in Win95, so that's not my issue.
So I've been experimenting with a card marked "CONNER 2MB FLOPPY CONTROLLER"...
I got it to read and write from/to a 1.44 MB floppy connected to that controller, but couldn't do format - "Track 0 bad" error every time, with every diskette.
I don't know wheter the controller is defective, or just lacks this functionality - I got it with a tape drive, and suspect it may be designed especially for tapes.
Nevermind it for now...
The important thing is: I ended up with a few "defective" diskettes...
After going back to a regular FDC, I tried to re-format them using normal DOS "format a: /u", but it ended up with some bad sectors.
Then I went to another PC, running Windows 95 OSR2 with BootGUI=0, and again did "format a: /u" - same amount of bytes in bad sectors, every time!
Couldn't believe they all got damaged...
Formatted once again, this time using DiskDupe...
...no bad sectors at all!
I had many disks that were like that and some others with bad sectors. I use Dave Dunnfield's ImageDisk under DOS and do a few rounds of the Erase Disk command, then go back to FORMAT /U /F:1.44 .. The disks come back to life, and even bad sectors get fixed after a few cycles of back-and-forth between Erase and Format (assuming no physical damage is on the media).
I also start my disk revival process with a media wipe using alcohol soaked microfiber, to rule out the effects of mold and dust on the media. Otherwise you might damage the drive if you keep feeding it dirty/moldy disks.
Have you tried VGACOPY to format disks? It tries to relocate sectory physically within the track, so you may have success with floppys that show track 0 error.
Have you tried to format disks in a LS120 drive?
I had one or two DD disks back in the day that soft corrupted, I'd stick them in the Amiga, format to Amiga 880K, format back to PC 720k with crossdos on Amiga, then stick them back in the PC can format /U again in DOS and they'd be back to useable. Never had a HD Amiga drive to see if it worked with 1.44 too... but I've since used dd on linux systems for same effect.
I have had an occasion where one drive was misaligned and I got multiple bad floppies on it that actually ended up being a drive issue. One time I had a drive that actually damaged discs due to some caked up gunk on its head...
But as far as super low-level format goes, I use a neodymium magnet stolen from a HDD. It makes even some actually bad floppies work for the duration of getting DOS or windows to install (and then hours later they start begoming unreadable again ?)
A few months ago I realigned a floppy drive head by hand. Part of the testing procedure including a full disk write and read. This absolutely put data in all kinds of weird and wrong places on the disk. I can confirm that I had a lot of corruption after the fact, but the disks were recovered just fine with a reformat in another machine. I couldn't use the same drive to format it, because I wasn't sure whether the heads were aligned yet.
So after the massive trouble of finding a 5.25" floppy drive and a connecting it up, then changing the BIOS so it's set as my A: drive, I tried to format a couple of high-density 1.2MB floppy disks using the "format A:" command in Command Prompt. Both times it formatted only 160KB and left it at that. If I then check the amount of space on those disks, it then comes up as 160KB. Why is this the case? How can I get my the full value out of my 1.2MB?
df19127ead