How does an OS determine if a floppy disk is inaccessible?

How does the operating system determine (internally) that a particular floppy disk is inaccessible (sector 0 is bad)? Can that error message be tracked down and instead have the correct data of sector 0 of the floppy be loaded into RAM?
Not really. Sector 0 (and track 0) is one of the few totally indispensible parts of a floppy disk, where the volume ID and a great deal of other information specific to that disk is kept. If that sector or track can't be written to reliably, the disk is declared bad. Given how cheap floppies are, it's just easier to discard it and get a new one.

This was first published in March 2004

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