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Ben Gough

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Software for DOS/Win3.1 to check integrity/validity of floppy diskette

I've googled around and I'm incredibly surprised to not have seen any sort of software that can check a floppy disk's sectors (or just check a floppy disk in general) to make sure it's fully functional with reading and writing data to its fullest capacity. Does anyone know where I can find software for DOS/Win3.1 that can accomplish this? Software for Windows XP/7/8 would be nice a nice bonus too. Many thanks
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Seth Simmons
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Have you tested this software : http://www.tucows.com/preview/347622 ?
If you are serious about floppy disk data then look at Kyroflux http://www.kryoflux.com/?page=home

This stuff is more for getting data off disks rather than writing to them.
Just format the floppies using the built-in format utility of DOS/Win 3.x (or win 9x). It will either succeed  with 0 problems, or tell you the number of sectors it failed at, which reduces the space you will have available on the floppy, or fail completely. Sometimes, if you get a number of bad sectors after the first run, it can help to format again, and maybe again. I've often seen where you'd get less and less bad sectors.

There used to be tools like Norton Utilities or PC-Tools which were able to do further tests, but that was usually not necessary, as the format would tell you all that was necessary.
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Ben Gough

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Thanks all for your responses.

@Seth - I'll try that and update the thread accordingly if it works how I need it to

@Benjamin - Unfortunately the link is dead or not letting me download the software for some reason, just downloads a file with a .website extension

@dbrunton - I'm not serious about it, just have some disks I want to check for integrity to make sure they read/write fine

@rindi - Windows seems to ignore any bad sectors when formatting, nor does it come back with any errors on the disks I have - but when using WinImage it has issues with the disks having bad sectors etc but copying the files manually (with Windows Explorer) works fine, hence why I want to make sure these disks are actually find by using some sort of software
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