I remember seeing a similar thread on vogons but I couldn't find it. Some one else has a few drives broken by one floppy disk.

What are the specs of your system? Are you using an add in controller card? Multiple drives with the abort, retry, fail error is usually indicative of a dead/dying controller card or cable. First thing I would do is try a different cable to rule that out.

Have any other machines you can test these drives in?

**I've never heard of a floppy drive destroying disk, but I suppose that's possible ^^

I've had this problem quite a few times.
You put a dying floppy disk in the drive that makes a weird sound.
Then you say to yourself "what the heck is happening ?! I'll verify with another disk"
Then you put a good disk in the drive and for some weird reasons, the disk drive can't read it anymore.

I'm pretty sure that the dying floppy disk has a circular mark. Maybe you can even see through it (put a light behind it and you'll see). The good floppy disk might have one too.

What you must do in that case :

1- kill the dying floppy disk with fire, it's dead, you can't do anything for it (except changing the magnetic disk inside if you want to keep the shell and copy the game back to it from the internet)
2- clean the floppy disk drive with alcohol by opening it or by using a cleaning disk because otherwize, there's a risk that the drive becomes a floppy killer.
3- test the floppy disk drive with another good floppy disk.

You have to be careful. The next time q floppy disk makes a strange sound and isn't readable properly, take it out aq quick as you can and verify that your drive wasn't damaged with a floppy you don't care for.

This applies to every floppy disk drive for PC. I never tested drives for other computers than pc but I don't see why it would be different

BeginnerGuy wrote:

What are the specs of your system? Are you using an add in controller card? Multiple drives with the abort, retry, fail error is usually indicative of a dead/dying controller card or cable. First thing I would do is try a different cable to rule that out.

Have any other machines you can test these drives in?

**I've never heard of a floppy drive destroying disk, but I suppose that's possible ^^

yes i manage to test ANOTHER drive and everything went good.

Deksor wrote:

I've had this problem quite a few times. You put a dying floppy disk in the drive that makes a weird sound. Then you say to you […]
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I've had this problem quite a few times.
You put a dying floppy disk in the drive that makes a weird sound.
Then you say to yourself "what the heck is happening ?! I'll verify with another disk"
Then you put a good disk in the drive and for some weird reasons, the disk drive can't read it anymore.

I'm pretty sure that the dying floppy disk has a circular mark. Maybe you can even see through it (put a light behind it and you'll see). The good floppy disk might have one too.

What you must do in that case :

1- kill the dying floppy disk with fire, it's dead, you can't do anything for it (except changing the magnetic disk inside if you want to keep the shell and copy the game back to it from the internet)
2- clean the floppy disk drive with alcohol by opening it or by using a cleaning disk because otherwize, there's a risk that the drive becomes a floppy killer.
3- test the floppy disk drive with another good floppy disk.

You have to be careful. The next time q floppy disk makes a strange sound and isn't readable properly, take it out aq quick as you can and verify that your drive wasn't damaged with a floppy you don't care for.

This applies to every floppy disk drive for PC. I never tested drives for other computers than pc but I don't see why it would be different

You are right on everything. thats the exact same thing as you mentionned.
a cleaning disk or something like that might do the trick, i had some thoughts about it.
but yeah the previous disk as a halo now. something bad with this disk...very bad.

can you buy cleaning kits ? or should i open it myself and clean it manually

That's pretty interesting. Anyone have a photo of these circular marks? Is it just the head scraping along the track after accumulating gunk?

I've had this problem with almost new in box floppies, that's definitely not gunk, that's rather the magnetic substract that has degradated over time. I'll make some photos when I'll be back home

So degraded surface material (and any other impurities) sticking to the head.

Wouldn't bother buying a cleaning disk if you can take the drive out and open it; you'll get a cleaner result by hand. Take off the top cover, blow out any dust and wipe the heads with alcohol.

One of my drives had lived most of its two decades with the front flap stuck open. There was a wild amount of clumped up dust packed in there when I got around to cleaning it.

Well I wasn't looking for cleaning disks, but over the time I've found one for each standard. And when you have a lot of these bad disks like me, cleaning disks are coming handy ^^. One thing I noticed though, sometimes, if I stop using the drive after a while, it will read disks with no issue. This doesn't happen to me all the time though

firage wrote:

So degraded surface material (and any other impurities) sticking to the head.

Wouldn't bother buying a cleaning disk if you can take the drive out and open it; you'll get a cleaner result by hand. Take off the top cover, blow out any dust and wipe the heads with alcohol.

One of my drives had lived most of its two decades with the front flap stuck open. There was a wild amount of clumped up dust packed in there when I got around to cleaning it.

damn, you were right, i opened the whole thing and cleaned with alcohol...
everything is back and working ! thats amazing ! thank you very much

Here are two photos of a killer 5"1/4 floppy disk :

As you can see, there are circular scratches.

And with a light behind it, you can see that the whole substract came off at places

That happened with my 3.5" floppy diskette copy of Windows 95 (never used). I wanted to make back up copies of the disks and the boot disk seemed to kill my drive immediately. I thought it might have been the drive since it was a really old Epson that came with a freebie 486 machine but it did it to my Teac as well. Luckily, cleaning the heads got both drives functional again but I didn't dare try any of the other Windows 95 diskettes.

lazibayer wrote:

I remember seeing a similar thread on vogons but I couldn't find it. Some one else has a few drives broken by one floppy disk.

That might have been me:
Issue with "killer floppies" damaging drives