Typically, floppy disks and other magnetic media use some kind of encoding system, rather than write 1s and 0s directly to the physical media. This encoding sy

Typically, floppy disks and other magnetic media use some kind of encoding system, rather than write 1s and 0s directly to the physical media. This encoding system serves multiple purposes, but mostly clock synchronization and error detection. If you put garbage data on the actual track, you'll get an error when you try to read it because it has an invalid encoding. Imagine that I handed you a piece of paper and asked you to tell me which letters were written on it, but the paper just had a bunch of squiggles on it. You'd tell me that there aren't any letters written on it, just squiggles. That's what it's like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording