VOGONS


First post, by lolo799

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Long story short, I bought a game, Blue Max Aces of the Great War, that you can see here:
Re: Bought these games today

It comes with three 720K floppy disks, which I assume worked, so I started dumping them using my Dell C840, first one worked, second one had some problems with a file or two, and the last one was completely unreadable.
At this point I was thinking, well, let's try with another drive, so I got a Teac USB drive out, plugged it in, and tried, didn't work, finally I fired up my old Pentium 200 tower to use my 20 years old floppy drive, and the results were identical, unreadable disk.

Now the bad part, I wanted to write an image to another floppy, used the C840, didn't work, on a floppy that was i know worked fine, I tried with a couple of good floppies, then tried with the previous tww drives as well, nothing worked, and my good floppies kept getting damaged...

The first floppy of the game:

The attachment bluemaxfloppy1.JPG is no longer available

The third one:

The attachment bluemaxfloppy3.JPG is no longer available

A victim of my new deadly drive:

The attachment bluemaxvictim.JPG is no longer available

And in case you want to hear the damage...

The attachment bluemax-floppy-audio.zip is no longer available

Would dismantling and cleaning the drives be enough to restore them to a working state?
Thanks for reading!

PCMCIA Sound, Storage & Graphics

Reply 1 of 7, by anachronism1887

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I had a new in box floppy copy of Windows 95 that basically did the exact same thing. First disk damaged the drive and damaged the next drive I tested to troubleshoot if it was the diskette or the drive. I took the two floppy drives I messed up apart and cleaned the heads with 99% isopropyl alcohol. The drives have been fine afterwards but, like you, I tried a known good disk beforehand and had it damaged.

At least in my experience, cleaning the heads should allow the drives to be functional. I don't know of a way to recover the floppy diskettes that have been damaged.

Reply 2 of 7, by Errius

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Are the disks shedding gunk onto the heads? Are they turning smoothly in their cases?

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 3 of 7, by lolo799

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Thanks for the tips.
I'll check the drives heads later this week.

PCMCIA Sound, Storage & Graphics

Reply 4 of 7, by Ampera

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Yea, clean the heads.

Reply 5 of 7, by kixs

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Had this issue with one 5.25" 1.2MB floppy disk. Ended with 5 broken 1.2MB floppy drives 😠 Cleaning heads didn't help...

Requests here!

Reply 6 of 7, by Errius

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A problem I've found with 5.25" disks is when they don't turn smoothly in their cases. (You can hear them squealing when spun). That messes up the drive motors and causes malfunctions that persist even when reading OK disks. Taking the drive apart and cleaning/oiling it seems to help. Always check that the disk media can rotate freely in the casing before inserting the disk in the drive. Unfortunately many retail game 5.25" disks have this problem.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 7 of 7, by kixs

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The bad 5.25" floppy had no signs of failure. It was read to about 67% then stopped. After this even known good disks wouldn't be read.

Requests here!