Yeah, I had to do the same thing with my Inca floppies. There was a floppy refresh utility in one of the old Norton Utilities that I've heard good things about, but it would not revive my Inca floppies. 🙁 So I had to resort to "sourcing" the missing files elsewhere.

edit: what I meant to get at is, you could use this Norton utility on your good disks to keep them in good shape.

There is another option, but it only works with floppies that are not full: SpinRite. SpinRite is a hard disk maintenance utility that is DOS-based, and it runs great on floppies and flash drives too. When it encounters a bad sector, it moves the contents of those sectors to good spare sectors. The issue is, if the floppy is already full, there aren't going to be enough spare sectors to relocate the data. But I have had success with it working on floppies that are only partially full.

edit: SpinRite would also work as a maintenance tool to keep your floppies in good health. It's something to consider. Run either Norton or SpinRite on your good floppies periodically to keep them healthy.

Do you think there's any truth to the rumors that floppy drives aren't built like they used to be, and excessive re-writing of a floppy with a newer drive might leave it worse off than it was originally?

This is of prime importance for collectors and archivists. I had not thought of using SpinRite for floppies. It has been a long time since I have paid any attention to it, but if memory serves it requires lower level access than what it would have on modern Windows and not all of us have or want a dino. For preservation the best way is to image the disks. With a KryoFlux you can even image non-PC diskettes and even flippy disks. It can even capture some copy protection tracks.

For recovery there are data recovery programs that can be used, but even so, some disks/files may not be recoverable. At one time there was someone here that had started a project to host PAR files for recovery of corrupt disks. This project folded. Not sure if that was because it was getting close to IP issues or what.

Jorpho wrote:

Do you think there's any truth to the rumors that floppy drives aren't built like they used to be, and excessive re-writing of a floppy with a newer drive might leave it worse off than it was originally?

It does seem that way sometimes. I don't know if it's that the newer drive isn't built as well. It might be something like the old drive has worn with many years of use, so its read/write head might be positioned slightly different, but still works fine with the data it's been reading/writing to all that time. Then you put that old disk in a new drive and the head is positioned where it's actually supposed to be, but the data on that old floppy was written with heads in a different position. I could see how that might cause data corruption.

collector wrote:

I had not thought of using SpinRite for floppies. It has been a long time since I have paid any attention to it, but if memory serves it requires lower level access than what it would have on modern Windows and not all of us have or want a dino.

Yeah, SpinRite runs from a real DOS boot environment. That could be a floppy or a flash drive formatted as a DOS boot disk. Can't run from Windows or from within any modern OS.

I've always likes VGA Copy back in the day.
The guy who developed it says it uses a bit of the vga memory to use DMA on low memory machines.

Could get around read errors pretty good and had a nice interface. Last version is from 2006 and it's freeware now. Still native DOS.

- heuristic bootsector virus check
- automatic floppy detection
- DMF disks
- min. 386 / 4 MB RAM / VGA card
- optional: mouse, SoundBlaster or GUS.

There might be better programs today, but I think its still pretty 😁

In my experience there are two causes of read errors:

- The physical media is still sound, but the magnetic flux has weakened to the point that the drive struggles to read it.
Multiple read retries can sometimes help here. Ejecting and reinsterting the disk seems to help sometimes too, as it forces the head to reposition itself.
An LS-120 is even better in this situation. I have lost count of the number of disks that had unreadable sectors on a normal floppy drive that the LS-120 was able to read.

- The physical media is no longer sound. Either the oxide coating is being scraped off by the head, or there is contamination on the surface (e.g. mould). Often there is a telltale high-pitched sound as the head scrapes off the oxide.
This is a lost cause, as read retries will only further damage the disk and contaminate the floppy head.
You really want to whip the disk out as soon as you start to hear that scraping sound.

For this reason I much prefer having manual control over read retries than using something like VGA-Copy.

If the floppy head does get contaminated, I find sometimes that putting in a sacrificial disk and doing multiple full-disk reads cleans it to the point where it starts working again.
Otherwise it's case open and clean it with IPA.

I almost never find a disk that can't be read ls-120 drive. If I do ever find a disk that does show any sign of damage to the data I pull as much as I can off the disk and replace the magnetic film inside the disk.

Jade Falcon wrote:

I almost never find a disk that can't be read ls-120 drive. If I do ever find a disk that does show any sign of damage to the data I pull as much as I can off the disk and replace the magnetic film inside the disk.

Interesting. You replace the magnetic donut inside the disk casing? Any tips for splitting and resealing the disk?

bjt wrote:

An LS-120 is even better in this situation. I have lost count of the number of disks that had unreadable sectors on a normal floppy drive that the LS-120 was able to read.

I wish this technology could be adapted to 5.25" drives somehow 😀

Stiletto wrote:

bjt wrote:

An LS-120 is even better in this situation. I have lost count of the number of disks that had unreadable sectors on a normal floppy drive that the LS-120 was able to read.

I wish this technology could be adapted to 5.25" drives somehow 😀

I was thinking the same thing. I had noticed that LS-120s were more capable reading fading disks as well. Now I no longer have an IDE port, even if any of my old drives were still good. Are there any IDE to USB adapters?

There are LS-120 drives for laptops (PCMCIA).

A few years ago I had to turn down a whole box of original C64 games because they are all visible moldy on the media surface (would have killed my drives).