Greg said:
Can someone tell me how to defrag a floppy with win xp, Was easy
with win 98 but I am stuck on this one.
Shenan Stanley wrote> Why?
There's no real need nor advantage to defragmenting something as
small as a floppy diskette.
For Shenan;\
So you are not going to tell me how to defrag a floppy, just ask why?
I was told these newsgroups were helpful, but I guess your ego just
got in the way.
No ego. Just trying to point out that just because it is/was possible to
do - it doesn't make it right/necessary/desired.
Being so small, the easiest way - as always (and safest) is to copy the
information off the diskette onto your hard drive, format the diskette
(full) and copy the information back to the floppy. There is just not that
much space on a floppy diskette and moving things around on this
"self-destructive" media is dangerous at best. I have personally witnessed
way too many students at college lose their work because they were working
directly off floppy disks - which just does not work well with Microsoft
Office products.. (Temp files and such without warning fill up the diskette,
user tries to save, no space, office locks up - two hours of work gone.. Or
they leave the diskette in their backpack and *poof*, "something" happens,
cannot read the diskette, even on a Macintosh.)
Perhaps this is one of the reasons the ability to defragment such media has
been removed from the OS series. There has to be reasons this type of media
is going away - and in my opinion it is size, reliability, storage (actual
physical size/weight) and compatibility. Many times, a floppy disk drive is
a special order item on new PCs now.
My suggestion is to not store anything on floppy diskettes. Invest in
CD-R/CD-RWs - which many times are actually CHEAPER than floppy diskettes
and definitively hold more. They also do not have fragmentation problems
nor are they as easily destroyed/messed up and there are very FEW machines
that do not have CD drives - so compatibility is not at issue.
--
=- Shenan -=<
=- MS MVP -=<
--
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