Re: Restoring dead floppies

On 2024-06-15 10:59:23 +0000, scole said:

 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?

Be careful ... if they're really old games, then some of those disk may be fine, but simply won't mount on the newer drives / computers. (Not that it makes any difference to you being able to use the disks unless you can find an older drive / computer that can read them or one of the expensive hardware devices that can be used to read them.)
If they really are dead, then there's no real way to resurrect them. You can try apps that claim to recover lost files from disks, but the chances are exztremely low you'll get anything useful from them and most likely nothing at all.