Question about erasing diskettes

[robertkn]

I'm going through and erasing some of my LS-120 120mb Superdisks. What I've been doing is deleting the files, then erasing "unused space."

As I observe the process with Windows Explorer open I see that eraser creates its temp file. But, after a while the first attempt to erase fails and the program reports that it could not delete the temp file and all data was not erased. Is that normal?

I do find that sometimes if I immediately run eraser a second time it will complete with no errors.

In one case I could not get it to complete without errors, so I reformatted the diskette, then erased free space and it completed with no errors.

Input?

 

[Joel]

Diskettes are magnetic media - how long was the last time you used them? Sometimes storing them for too long will make the data consistency bad. This may lead to erasing errors. Formatting rewrites all the data structures supporting the file system and hence may increase the success rate.

Joel

 

[robertkn]

Thank you for your reply. They are not that old and were safely stored. I erased about 15 of them. About 1/2 of them erased successfully on the first pass. On some occasions, as described above I had trouble. I found the solution to be:

a. After receiving the error, making additional erasing attempts eventually brought success. Usually they erased successfully on the second pass.

b. In a couple cases I reformatted the diskette and after doing so another attempt or 2 brought about successful erasure.

I have no idea what the quirk was, but I guess the key is persistence on the part of the operator!