On Fri, 23 Feb 96 15:17:40 EST  mike.long@analog.com wrote:
> 
> A soft error is one that goes away when you retry the read or write
> that caused it.  Hard errors don't go away no matter how many times
> you retry.  If you get a lot of soft errors, then you should clean
> or replace your floppy drive.

Not necessarily; I found that a BT545C on a 386 class machine will
tend to flood the ISA bus and make lots 'o soft errors on a floppy
drive.  The fix is using the built in floppy drive (if your version
has one).  Then again this might be a BT545C specific issue...