Is your experience based only on 3.5" 1.44MB disks or does it include other types of media?

Great tips by the way, i experienced most of the the issues you describe.

carlostex wrote:

Is your experience based only on 3.5" 1.44MB disks or does it include other types of media?

Mostly 720k and 360k discs actually. My overall impression is that these are fairly resilient, the 360k more so. Makes sense with the large surface area I guess.

The 1.44MB are a complete pain, even visually perfect disks are often unreadable!

Any tips on how to clean the heads of a 1.44 MB or 1.2 MB floppy disk drive?

Myself i use a cotton bud (Q-tip) and rubbing alcohol (96%). The heads dry off fast enough that i can use the drives immeditely. Disks that seem to be unreadable all of a sudden work.

But like bjt said its better to use isopropyl alcohol.

bjt wrote:

Mostly 720k and 360k discs actually. My overall impression is that these are fairly resilient, the 360k more so. Makes sense with the large surface area I guess.

The 1.44MB are a complete pain, even visually perfect disks are often unreadable!

Again, this is pretty much what i experienced.

Yep, just very light pressure on the heads. I always seem to need to remove the drive and disassemble it to get access, maybe it can be done in situ with a torch and a long cotton bud. It's a pain anyway.

The LS-120 is a bit of a revelation for regular floppies. Several times as fast as a regular drive and just breezes through most (but not all) tricky read errors.
I'm using WinImage at the moment but am open to suggestions if there's a better imaging utility out there.

jesolo wrote:

Any tips on how to clean the heads of a 1.44 MB or 1.2 MB floppy disk drive?

I use those cleaning `floppydisks` (i only recommend to use the cotton fiber ones, and not those sand paper one.. ( those last one will damage the floppy disk heads)

Old floppy disks loosing there data because the magneted field will degrees over time.. Always re-copy your disks again..

Make sure the rubbing alcohol is ISOPROPYL alcohol. Not "denatured" ethanol alcohol, since sometimes they contains petroleum distillates, sometimes kerosene, and other additives to make the ethanol undrinkable. Those additives might cause issues on read heads and media over time. Isopropyl alcohol usually is found at 70%, which 30% of that is water, so drying takes a bit longer. Make sure to use 99% isopropyl alcohol, though I know a lot of people use 70% without issues.

This is why I want one of those floppy emulators 😵

I'll also add that you can try different drives if you have trouble reading disks (both 5.25" and 3.5"). Often the heads will be aligned very slightly differently, and so a disk that won't read in one drive will read in another. I have a 5.25" drive where the heads are slightly misaligned, but I keep it that way because it will read disks that normal drives won't (since those disks must have been written in a drive that was also misaligned in the same way.)

Those are some good tips, thanks for sharing! 😀

nforce4max wrote:

This is why I want one of those floppy emulators 😵

But those floppy emulators don't make that special fuzzy-inducing coffee grinder noise, right? 😢

bjt wrote:

The LS-120 is a bit of a revelation for regular floppies. Several times as fast as a regular drive and just breezes through most (but not all) tricky read errors.

Knew about the read speeds, but had no idea it would be a bit better with read errors! 😀

Coffee filters with isopropyl alcohol (I recommend 99% or above) is great. Q-tips leave lint behind.

I also had some disks for backup with similar conditions. Wrong storage - mould on the surface, chocolate, sand, oxidized with rough surface, head removes magnetic layer etc.

I use Kryoflux for archiving disks. It is really helpful with various formats as well as reading bad disks.

I've never used a Kryoflux - can you give an example of how it's better than normal floppy access when reading marginal disks?

It samples the time differences between magnetization changes. You get this per rotation and track. A software algorithm extracts from this data the data for a given disk format (MFM, GCR and so on). Usually it samples multiple (5?) rotations before the algorithm runs. If there is some error it retries a given number of times. It also moves the head away and seeks again. This can lead to slight position offset - thus sampling another area of the surface. So it can build up a valid track from parts.

With some visualization tool you can make such pictures from the sampled data: ftp://retronn.de/pictures/kryoflux/Imsai_CPM_ … rsafloppy_1.png

If Kryoflux is cool, and LS-120 SuperDisk is cool (wonder how LS-240 is...), wonder what an ATAPI version of Kryoflux (with appropriate software updates) combined with an LS-120 would do! 😁

Stiletto wrote:

If Kryoflux is cool, and LS-120 SuperDisk is cool (wonder how LS-240 is...), wonder what an ATAPI version of Kryoflux (with appropriate software updates) combined with an LS-120 would do! 😁

Never managed to find one alas. The old internal LS-120 drives were kinda common years ago and was quite easy to stock up with (usually getting a bunch of disks as a bonus for 'free').

Another mystery is that I had read years ago some Superdisk drives were said to be able to read/write 2.88MB floppy disks, but I never managed to confirm this.

I guess we're starting to get off-topic, but:

Here's some LS-240 drive part numbers, mostly extracted from CNet.
Addonics Pocket SuperDisk LS-240 240 MB External USB - Part Number: AEPSD240UM
Fujitsu Celsius S26391-F300-V300 CELSIUS MOBILE -FSC1 - Part Number: QUT 1FDDZZZFXC7
HP LS-240 (SuperDisk) Super Disk Module for OmniBooks - IDE - Part Number: F2022B
HP LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive - IDE - Part Number: F3658AV
IBM SuperDisk LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive for Ultrabay 2000 - IDE - Part Number: 08K9615
IBM SuperDisk LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive for Ultrabay 2000 - IDE - Part Number: 08K9616
IBM SuperDisk LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive for Ultrabay 2000 - IDE - Part Number: 08K9616-01
IBM ThinkPad SuperDisk LS-240 Ultrabay 2000 drive - Part Number: 08L9616
Imation SDD-240USBSL LS-240 (SuperDisk) 240 MB External USB drive (LKM-FK73-D) - Part Number: SDD-240USBSL
Intel LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive - IDE - Part Number: ATGLSDRVCAR
Matsushita/Panasonic LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (grey, slim) - IDE - Part Number: LKM-FH33-5
Matsushita/Panasonic LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (grey, slim) - IDE - Part Number: LKM-FH34-5
Matsushita/Panasonic LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (beige) - IDE - Part Number: LKM-FH33-E
Matsushita/Panasonic LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (beige) - IDE - Part Number: LKM-FH34-E
Matsushita/Panasonic LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive - USB - Part Number: LKM-FK73-D
Panasonic LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (white) - USB - Part Number: LK-RF240UZ
Panasonic LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (black) - USB - Part Number: LK-RF240UZ-K
QPS Que! SuperDisk 240 FD32 - LS-240 bus powered USB - (LKM-FK73-D) - Part Number: QPLS240USB
QPS Que! D2 Dual Drive LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive - IEEE 1394 (FireWire) - Part Number: QPD2DDLSF6G
Winstation SuperDisk LS-240 - LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (beige) - IDE - Part Number: W0281
Winstation SuperDisk LS-240 - LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive (black) - IDE - Part Number: W0371
Winstation SuperDisk LS-240 - LS-240 (SuperDisk) drive - PC Card - Part Number: W0341

Some are OEM surplus or IDE with custom interfaces (notebooks).

Of all of these, these are the relevant eBay auctions I can find easily:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/361477255525
http://www.ebay.com/itm/191785785916
http://www.ebay.com/itm/151187792235
http://www.ebay.com/itm/311513188854

Stiletto wrote:

If Kryoflux is cool, and LS-120 SuperDisk is cool (wonder how LS-240 is...), wonder what an ATAPI version of Kryoflux (with appropriate software updates) combined with an LS-120 would do! 😁

Probably not much. Kryoflux works because the PC floppy interface returns raw magnetic data from the disk surface, with all the smarts living in the disk drive controller board (i.e. the ISA card you plug the floppy cable into.) Since Kryoflux functions as the disk controller, it gets access to all the magnetic data and it can run advanced algorithms on it to better extract the data, which the normal PC floppy controller was not designed to do.

As the name suggests, IDE moved all these smarts from the disk controller over to the drive itself, so there's no way of getting magnetic flux information out of an IDE drive. You generally only have high level read/write operations, and if there were other methods, the IDE interface does not stop a conventional program from using them. Compare this to the PC floppy drive controller, which can't read many non-DOS formats no matter how you program the chip. So anyone can write a program that speaks ATAPI, and it would be no different to an ATAPI version of Kryoflux. IDE and ATAPI are much too high-level.

Incidentally this may be one (of a few) reasons why LS-120 drives are better at reading dodgy disks. They may have a completely different controller than a normal PC (since they don't have to retain PC Floppy compatibility) so they might be able to apply more advanced algorithms to the data.