First post, by jonaszoon
For this summer I had planned to make a final, complete backup of all my floppy disks collected over the years.
I started off with the 5 1/4" DD disks, which range from 16 to 22 years old, so initially I was quite pessimistic about their "survival". However, out of the 100 disks, only 5 had serious errors (excluding copy protection stuff), so I was very pleased with the result.
With the previous result in my mind, I enthustiastically began backupping the 3,5" DD/HD disks, 8-18 years old. However, my enthusiasm was soon tempered; 1 out of 3 disks had bad sectors (something I had expected earlier) and a pretty strange phenomenon emerged: Certain disks (mostly TDK branded) triggered a horrible grinding noise, as if the drive was in need of oil. It seemed like the drive motor couldn't keep up or something, so as soon as I heared the noise (it often began upon insertion of the disk), I broke off the backup process. After a while, I discovered that the contents of the "grinding" disks could be listed if tried multiple times. Unfortunately, this led me to reckless behaviour, like forcing the backup tool to retry and retry and retry. So obviously at one point, the floppy drive stopped responding, seemingly for good.
My question is: What is wrong with those disks? Is there any way to fix them? They have no remarkable visual differences and are not the oldest among the disks. Also they behave the same in every other floppy drive I tried and did not during an earlier (partial) backup in 1996 (I haven't used the disks since).