I can already hear the drive going:

urrrt, urrrrt, urrrrt, urrrt

as it tries to read old disks with bad sectors. 😢

Hopefully there is some good stuff.

Also got six complete sets of MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Excel, Powerpoint, and Word, and miscellaneous utility and

Hopefully that'll keep me in spare 3.5" disks for a good long while.

Every 3.5" disk I've checked has been bad.

That's unfortunate. I don't hold much hope out for the 5.25".

Have you tried with multiple drives? Or possibly cleaning your current one? Just a thought, strange to have that many bad floppies in a bunch.

I tried two different drives, but they also reported errors at differetn spots on the disks. I'm tracking down my disk cleaner right now.

I own countless of 1.44MB floppy drives, many (most?) of them often find bad sectors on disks written using other floppy drives, even when reformatting the disks. This is very annoying but in my experience Samsung makes (made?) the best floppy drives, they read even the disks other floppy drives totally reject.

Samsung SFD-321B is my favorite flavour of 1.44MB floppy drive, it's the one I use for backing up disks and all other floppy drives seem to like disks it has formatted and witten to. If I have issues reading a disk with another floppy drive I back it up and then rewrite it with the Samsung drive and that fixes the issue 9 times out of 10. I also use this floppy drive when doing BIOS updates.

I just checked how much a Samsung SFD-321B floppy drive used to cost here in Sweden... ~7.5 euro. A good quality floppy drive sure was expensive... but they are out of stock now...

https://www.dustinhome.se/product/5010329046/ … 321b?ssel=false

Ye Data drives are particularly sought after for some reason I don't understand. I think it's because they support the Japanese "mode 3" floppy format?

So far, out of fifteen OEM WIndows install floppies checked, 12 of them have had bad sectors or other data issues, on three different drives.

That seems a little odd. It's possible I have three bad drives, I've really only used them for a boot floppy ocasionally, I mostly stick to my HXC.

Does anyone have experience with aligning the heads of floppy drives? You apparently need an oscilloscope for this.

keenerb wrote:

Every 3.5" disk I've checked has been bad.

That's unfortunate. I don't hold much hope out for the 5.25".

Try and get an LS-120 / Superdisk - they are VERY good at reading old floppies. I was able to read 100% of the disks I own and image them where I was getting 75% success with a normal drive.

brassicGamer wrote:

keenerb wrote:

Every 3.5" disk I've checked has been bad.

That's unfortunate. I don't hold much hope out for the 5.25".

Try and get an LS-120 / Superdisk - they are VERY good at reading old floppies. I was able to read 100% of the disks I own and image them where I was getting 75% success with a normal drive.

I actually have two LS-120's but neither work.

Also, it's not about reading them, they're bog-standard Windows 3.1 and Office install disks you can find anywhere on the internet.

I was hoping to use them as a stash of blanks...

Errius wrote:

Ye Data drives are particularly sought after for some reason I don't understand. I think it's because they support the Japanese "mode 3" floppy format?

There are Windows 95/98 drivers available that work with other manufacturers' drives (provided the motherboard BIOS supports the format)...so probably not.

I think the disks have to spin at a different RPM. Can all drives handle this?

keenerb wrote:

I actually have two LS-120's but neither work. […]
Show full quote

brassicGamer wrote:

keenerb wrote:

Every 3.5" disk I've checked has been bad.

That's unfortunate. I don't hold much hope out for the 5.25".

Try and get an LS-120 / Superdisk - they are VERY good at reading old floppies. I was able to read 100% of the disks I own and image them where I was getting 75% success with a normal drive.

I actually have two LS-120's but neither work.

Also, it's not about reading them, they're bog-standard Windows 3.1 and Office install disks you can find anywhere on the internet.

I was hoping to use them as a stash of blanks...

Did you try blowing them out with compressed air? Try that. You can also try that on a normal floppy drive. But don't use a million billion PSI. Keep it reasonable. And try to blow in at an angle to help any dust escape, rather than blowing in at 90 degrees and pushing all the dust against the back of the drive.

Make sure not to use a standard cleaning disk on a LS-120 drive, but if you can find any, try one on the regular floppy drive.

Are you sure you set it up correctly? I set mine up in my BIOS by setting drive A to "reserved" and I think I also had to go and set the drive type in the IDE settings for the drive

It's certainly possible for all of those disks to be bad, but if NONE of them are reading ok, then the drive could be bad.

There's always the option to buy another LS-120 drive... I bought one on Ebay a few months ago for about $12 shipped. It was one of the Macintosh USB ones with the funky cable. I opened it up and took the IDE drive out. I took the little screw out of the front bottom to get the plastic eject button off, leaving the recessed metal tab. I put it into one of my Dells that had the molded floppy in the case itself, and it fit perfectly after removing the plastic eject button. It works perfectly! It was not a big investment at all. I've thought about buying a few more, taking the drives out and reselling on Ebay for more money.

I tested all the 3.5" disks, out of the > 200 in those cases, around a dozen could be successfully formatted in my "primary" floppy disk drive.

I took a subset of the unreadable disks (around 15) and they were not readable or capable of being formatted in a newish USB 3.5" drive, or formatted as 720k disks in an otherwise perfectly functional tandy 1000 double-density floppy drive. I assume that they were stored in a location that was not conducive to maintaining floppy disk integrity.

Most of the 360k 5.25" disks I've tested have been readable, but mostly just the same old stuff you can find on the internet already, nothing surprising...

Make sure to visually inspect the media before you insert it. If you see anything growing on there, it's had it.

As a footnote, even though none of the original installation media were readable, I was able to archive over 75 3.5" floppy disks returned to us from Iron Mountain, and ALL successfully formatted with no errors. They were backups labeled from 1996 - 1999, so it's safe to say they were around 20 years old.

That's probably a great example of how storage conditions can dramatically impact media reliability.

Also, curiously none of the disks were readable in a USB floppy disk drive. They were an odd format, 3.5" high-density disks but with only around 1.2mb of usable storage, but LESS usable storage than a 1.2mb HD 5.25" drive. My Tandy 1000 read all of them without an issue, though, and the USB drive was able to format each of them successfully...