oldhighgerman wrote on 2025-03-04, 07:40:
CMB75 wrote on 2025-03-04, 06:39:Been fiddling around with old floppies and drives, to me it's absolutely astounding that those disks from the 80s still work perfectly. Haven't had one bad in 30+ disks I tested.
Working on finding some motivation to continue a project I stalled last year... I guess I'll start with cleaning and re-greasing some of the old drives.
O NO. They do not work perfectly. In fact it may be that if you actually accessed them once, it could have been the FINAL TIME. This isn't said often enough. Upon finding an old disk, do NOTHING with it prior to reading it into an image/file. You may live to regret it otherwise. Do not try to determine its contents (if it's unlabeled, mislabeled). Don't do a directory scan. Just hit it with whatever people are using these days. I used to use ImageDisk by Dave Dunfield.
I took have had lots of success with old floppies. But often times I've found they're only good for 1 access. Then it's bye-bye. For the rest of eternity.
It honestly depends on the quality of the disk, later ones fare better than the earlier ones due to higher quality production methods and materials but its also partly due to how the disks were stored, if they were stored in a cool dry place then the chances of them failing is pretty low.
The main thing you should do before using them is to make sure the drive you are using is in top condition with clean heads and that the disk surface itself is not contaminated.
Ive gone through hundreds of disks at this point for my Amiga and C64 backing them up and sure you get failures but the vast majority worked fine and still do. I found that early PC disks tend to be the worst for failures, especially the 360k and 720k ones .. the fabbing quality of them was .. suspect even back in the day and they also tend to suffer from mould more than the 1.2/1.44 ones do.
On the subject of backing up disks I find the Grease Weasel to be a excellent bit of kit to own, it pretty much lets you read/write any disk via the PC which makes backing them up super easy, naturally you may want to use something like Flux Engine in combination with the weasel to increase the disk formats it can read.
IIRC there is also the Applesauce hardware that can read old Apple formats allowing you to back them up to PC.
Forgot to mention the Kryoflux ..its for the crazy ones out there with cash to burn and who require the lowest level of reading available, IIRC this thing can read any disk you throw at it since it doesn't care in the slightest what format it is. Its some truly black magic hardware that I secretly want a reason to buy ...cant justify the cost of it however.
