Hey all,
I've been having some unique issues with my floppies recently, and figure some of you guys may have an idea what the cause could be.
I have a series of blank floppy disks that I've labeled A through D, which I use as generic disks whenever I want to write some new game and try it out. These have been prepared as you'd expect: I put a piece of tape over the holes of 1.44 MB floppies to trick the MSX (and my Windows USB floppy drive) into thinking they're 720kb disks, and formatted them through Disk Manager (on a Windows 7 machine) prior to writing MSX data to them for the first time.
For the last year or so, I've had no trouble with this, and have used this technique to sample any number of games on my Panasonic FS-A1WX MSX2+ system.
However, recently, all four of these disks have just immediately started giving me "The operation was completed successfully" within one second of starting a write through Disk Manager -- I'm unable to write any data to them at all anymore, as they just immediately shut down on me as soon as I try. Even when I try to reformat them in Disk Manager, I just get "The operation was completed successfully" the second I start. And when I try to format them on my MSX itself through CALL FORMAT, I get a bad disk error.
I've tried writing to other disks in my collection (ones that I had previously "permanently" written to, with no intent of ever changing their contents), and some of those have started giving me the same error -- though others work just fine, and I'm able to write to them without any trouble at all.
I would just assume all these disks went bad and leave it at that, but what's really weird here is that every single one of these "defective" disks will still boot in my MSX with the last game I wrote to them -- no signs of trouble reading any of the data on them whatsoever, I just (seemingly) can't ever write over it again. It's as if the disks have copy-protected themselves without my knowledge or consent (and no, I haven't touched the copy-protect tab on any of them).
Is this... normal? Or is something funky going on with my disks?
Any help you can provide here would be appreciated, and if my disks HAVE gone bad, any ideas as to why that might've happened would also be appreciated -- I take very good care of my disks, storing them in a plastic disk case, in a plastic drawer, away from direct sunlight and otherwise out of harm's way.
Thanks!
-Tom