Old disks will degrade eventually, but I've been lucky I guess. The fall rate also depends on several factors, as I've experienced.

Disk brand. Some brands will go bad fairly often, some hardly. Also no name disks can sometimes appear reliable as well, but it's a mixed bucket.

Floppy drive. Some drives are better than others. You'll have to play around with several drives to determine which is the most reliable. Some drive may mark a drive as unbearable or track 0 damaged, while another driver will happily format the apparently not so broken disk. Oh, I'm a LS120 fan: Very reliable but may fail with non standard format.

Operating system. One os may be more reliable with floppy disks than another, don't ask why... I prefer DOS over XP and 98 over 95.

Also the way of storage will affect the reliability. Cold or humid environment can trigger mold which literally eat the disk itself. This sucks to the drives head and contaminate the next disk.

waterbeesje wrote on 2023-11-24, 18:12:

Old disks will degrade eventually, but I've been lucky I guess. The fall rate also depends on several factors, as I've experienc […]
Show full quote

Old disks will degrade eventually, but I've been lucky I guess. The fall rate also depends on several factors, as I've experienced.

Disk brand. Some brands will go bad fairly often, some hardly. Also no name disks can sometimes appear reliable as well, but it's a mixed bucket.

Floppy drive. Some drives are better than others. You'll have to play around with several drives to determine which is the most reliable. Some drive may mark a drive as unbearable or track 0 damaged, while another driver will happily format the apparently not so broken disk. Oh, I'm a LS120 fan: Very reliable but may fail with non standard format.

Operating system. One os may be more reliable with floppy disks than another, don't ask why... I prefer DOS over XP and 98 over 95.

Also the way of storage will affect the reliability. Cold or humid environment can trigger mold which literally eat the disk itself. This sucks to the drives head and contaminate the next disk.

I happen to have a wild variety of floppy drives - Mitsumi, Teac, Sony, Nec. And a ton of them too. When maintained properly, they all seem to perform adequately, except for one specific Nec in my Compaq Deskpro.

As for disks, I would expect Basf and Sony disks to hold up better, but surprisingly it was not the case. Actually, I think when the disk was made was more important - older FDDs seem to be a lot more reliable, disks from 80s have a much higher survival rate than disks from late 90s.

I've had trouble with track 0 errors a few times, too.😓

Normally, that error means the diskette is toast.

What *sometimes* helped them going, though, was writing back an floppy image by using WinImage.

WinImage would overwrite the floppy without checking track 0.
And once done, MS-DOS will see a normally formated DOS floppy.

Of course, track 0 might be still not okay after that procedure. Not sure if booting works.
But the diskette may work again for simple tasks, like transfering files between two PCs.

DOS is a pretty stupid OS, and when it tries to be "smart" it's even worse.

Track 0 bad can be caused by a few things but not all of them are actual media defects. Wrong format already present on the floppy (even when using /U option) can cause that too, as well as some glitches and bad sector headers. The best way is to use a magnetic media eraser, or strong permanent magnet, to wipe the floppy clean so that DOS can't find anything on it. Note that permanent magnet for 3.5" floppies must be really strong (neodymium, for example from dead HDD) since the plastic case forces an air gap to the media surface which greatly reduces the field. It's best to try at least a few times, even for 5.25" floppies, on these you might be leaving behind strong magnetic "residue" that the head can't overcome.

I've rescued quite a few floppies with a magnet, some I also post-erased with high frequency signal using Greaseweazle (doing multiple passes for each track). Not all of those I would trust to hold data for a long time, some already have visible surface wear, but at least I can use them until they die completly and thus save the unused NOS floppies for later. I use floppies a lot, this is still the easiest method of file transfer between some of the systems I have.

I've had track 0 issues too. Early DOS versions didn't seem to care, so you could always format the disk with one of them.

I happen to have an eraser to wipe out VHS tapes, but it can be used to properly erase a floppy disk too. Then see if it can be formatted without the track 0 problem.

I've also heard (but not confirmed) that windows can alter track 0 such that the disk will no longer be recognised in DOS.

Re: Super low-level Format for floppy

Grzyb, depending on DOS version you might need to use /C along /U to recover clusters already marked as bad. IIRC this is needed in 6.x but not 5.0 which does not know /C. DOS 3.x and prior didn't even have /U, format was always a format and not read test plus FAT wipe.

I saved hundreds of disks. You'd be surprised how reselient they can be. Storage in basements will grow mold on them that must be cleaned first. Extreme heat from attic storage could be game over. But even with such conditions, they are often possible to save and make them useful again without bad sectors.

Track 0 errors are due to DOS stupidity mainly as other said. Use low-level format tools and you can make DOS format happy again. I personally love ImageDisk's suite of tools, which includes the awesome "Erase Disk" command. It's usually the fix for DOS's "Track 0 error" during format.

Our family's floppies were stored in the attic since 1990 or so (still readable).
For storage, we used to add news paper to the cardboard boxes the diskettes were stored in.

Whole diskette boxes containing floppies were stored inside them, too.
That helped to insulate against cold/heat and kept everything dry.

Really, let's never underestimate the power of the newspapers.
We had VHS cassettes stored in cardboard boxes stuffed w/ news papers (sealed with duct tape).
They survived 20 years in the horrible garage that way, with no mold.

The box looked beaten down, but the seal was not broken.
Everything inside looked like new, no smell. What can't be said about the rest being located in the garage.
Many boxes and stuff had rotten away.

That was in civilized Europe, of course. No idea how well that works in Australia, North America or the Rain Forest.
You guys over there have all sorts of wild animals that may enter the garage or house and eat cardboard/paper or use it for housing.

Edit: The "civilized Europe" was a joke..
Though the wildlife is rather modest here.
Animals normally don't enter houses, except for little mice or dormice.
We don't find Koalas sleeping in our cardboard boxes. 😂 Okay one, sorry, I couldn't resist.

wbahnassi wrote on 2023-11-25, 05:13:

I saved hundreds of disks. You'd be surprised how reselient they can be. Storage in basements will grow mold on them that must be cleaned first. Extreme heat from attic storage could be game over. But even with such conditions, they are often possible to save and make them useful again without bad sectors.

Track 0 errors are due to DOS stupidity mainly as other said. Use low-level format tools and you can make DOS format happy again. I personally love ImageDisk's suite of tools, which includes the awesome "Erase Disk" command. It's usually the fix for DOS's "Track 0 error" during format.

That's actually a very neat idea. I downloaded the ImageDisk 1.19 program and will give it a try later today, I hope it works as expected on Win98.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-11-25, 07:15:

Our family's floppies were stored in the attic since 1990 or so (still readable). For storage, we used to add news paper to the […]
Show full quote

Our family's floppies were stored in the attic since 1990 or so (still readable).
For storage, we used to add news paper to the cardboard boxes the diskettes were stored in.

Whole diskette boxes containing floppies were stored inside them, too.
That helped to insulate against cold/heat and kept everything dry.

Really, let's never underestimate the power of the newspapers.
We had VHS cassettes stored in cardboard boxes stuffed w/ news papers (sealed with duct tape).
They survived 20 years in the horrible garage that way, with no mold.

The box looked beaten down, but the seal was not broken.
Everything inside looked like new, no smell. What can't be said about the rest being located in the garage.
Many boxes and stuff had rotten away.

That was in civilized Europe, of course. No idea how well that works in Australia, North America or the Rain Forest.
You guys over there have all sorts of wild animals that may enter the garage or house and eat cardboard/paper or use it for housing.

Edit: The "civilized Europe" was a joke..
Though the wildlife is rather modest here.
Animals normally don't enter houses, except for little mice or dormice.
We don't find Koalas sleeping in our cardboard boxes. 😂 Okay one, sorry, I couldn't resist.

The worst danger to my stuff is actually my girlfriend, who at this point is convinced that I have a hoarding problem 😁

So a quick recap. Eventually I went with reformat. If you don't have a DOS PC like me you'll see it doesn't work from Windows, but works perfectly well when launched from DOS.

The disks that refused low level format were definitely damaged. Those that passed, I did a full format from Windows. Quite a few didn't pass it, so I labelled those as faulty too.

In the end, the best thing that happened is that disks that reported bad blocks are now mostly 100% functional.

My yield is 20 fully working floppies, 4 floppies with bad blocks, and 25 report that they are dead. That's 2 boxes of floppies, and I'm quite happy with the result.