Re: Resurrecting dead floppies with alcohol

In article <140920240727420035%vintageapplemac@gmail.com>,
 scole <vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, it's been a few months since I posted to the group asking how to
restore "dead" floppies, and one tip* that was given was to use
isopropyl alcohol.
 
I've not had these old Macs booted since I read that message, been
hellish busy, but I just fired up my Performa 5320, applied some
alcohol to my Civilization floppies that had hitherto resolutely
refused to be read, et voila! The discs all mounted!
 
It took a few attempts, actually, maybe 4 or 5 applications of alocohol
to each disk before each finally mounted. I was able to back-up each
floppy to hard disk, too.
 
A great result! I intend to work through my entire collection of
big-box floppy games. :)
 
I have ditched a lot of disks over the years that refused to mount.
Damn shame, as if I knew this trick I could probably have salvaged a
lot of them. PD, newsletter/user groups stuff, magazine cover disks,
all lost, like tears in rain. :(
 
Anyway, massive gratitude to Mr Finnigan for the tip!
 
*I cannot reply to the post where the tip was given, as it seems
Eternal September has suffered a catastrophic failure and lost all
messages older than a couple of months. I hope Ray Banana gets them
back!

That's great news! And sorry to hear about the other floppies you threw away - I
also tended to do that, though mostly with old blanks that initialization. Will
try the isopropyl alcohol next time. Since they're not making them anymore, I
feel really bad about throwing floppies away ... even though I have enough to
last until I'm 100 I think :-)

Could you please take a moment and check which of your floppies have been
preserved on macintoshgarden.org already? You might have something not archived
yet that we run in danger of losing forever otherwise ...