First post, by TomVDJ
I have quite some old 5.25" floppies, some of them "originals". I recently placed an old 5.25" floppy drive into an old Windows XP PC, with the single purpose of reading out my old floppies.
I enabled the drive as a 5.25" 1.2 MB drive (which it is) in the Bios of the machine, and the light lights up when inserting a disc, but It can not read about half of the floppies I still have. These are quite old, but always stored in good conditions (not too warm, in sleeves, in a good old plastic case and in the dark), so it would really surprise me if indeed some much discs went bad. I would expect a few not to be readable, but half of them?
And from the discs that can be read, most of the time the index is shown (so the file listing) but when I try to make an actual image, halfway reading the disc, I get a read error.
So my question here: does somebody have experience with this kind of "behaviour" of the drive? Is it likely that the problem lies with the drive itself and is it worthwhile trying to get a new drive? Or is it actually possible that so many discs went bad over the course of the years?
P.S. I also had MANY 3.5 inch floppy discs from the same time, stored in the same conditions, and I could read about all of them (3 disks were unreadable) with a 3.5 inch external USB floppy drive. So that's why I assumed that also the majority of the 5.25" discs should be OK too.