Re: Restoring dead floppies

On 2024-06-15, scole <vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:

So, I have a large collection of vintage Mac games, something in the
order of 160 or so, most of which are "big box" games, about half of
which are CD-ROM and the other half floppy disk. Sadly, but
inevitably, many of the floppy disks are now dead; they do not mount
to desktop.  Seeing as they're all 30 or more years old, it's no
surprise that disk rot has finally got them, but still a bit sad.
>
It did make me wonder, though, is there any value in going to the
effort to restore the disks? I mean, I know the answer is "No, none
whatsoever" but... the idea that these games are now little more than
ornaments on my shelf rather than actual useable software depresses me
a little.
>
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?

I made disk images of all of my old floppies years ago in anticipation
that eventually, the data on the floppies would succumb to bit rot.

I'd bet you that reformatting those dead floppies will result in
perfectly usable disks that you could store data on. But the only way to
be sure is to give it a shot.

And as you suggested, I'm betting a whole lot of that software is
available on sites like Macintosh Garden as well.

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