Re: Restoring dead floppies

On 2024-06-17, D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> wrote:

scole wrote:

 
It should be trivial to find digital back-ups of these on the web but
are these disks physically beyond use now, or is it just data
corruption? If I were to format the disks, would I be able to place
the software back onto them?

>
In many cases I've found that I can clean the magnetic media (the
"cookie") and get a successful copy from Disk Copy 4.2. Have you ever
tried cleaning a floppy disk in this way? I've used the technique for
many 5.25" Apple II disks as well.
>
https://macgui.com/news/article.php?t=456

Back when computers used 5¼ floppy disks, my father taught me to use a
similar method since the inside of the floppy jacket was soft fabric. In
some instances, we even removed the disks from their jackets completely,
washed them in alcohol, allowed them to dry, and put them back into the
jackets. We rescued many a floppy that way!

Of course that won't help if the data on the disk is corrupted due to
magnetism and so on. In that case, the best you can do is erase,
reformat and restore the data from another source.

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