Re: Restoring dead floppies

On 17 Jun 2024 21:34:13 GMT, Jolly Roger wrote:

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.

Before I graduated to the Mac ecosystem, I was a member of a user group
for one of the "home computers" popular in the early 1980s. One of our
members had a particularly messy desk which ended up having a speaker
perched atop a stack of 5¼" floppies. Months of music quite effectively
rendered the data on those disks quite useless.

Not all floppy disks are created equal. When my spousal unit did customer
support for an antivirus software company, she told of an infected disk
received in the snail-mail (a normal occurrence back then), that after
being analyzed, could not be erased by any means, even after several
passes with a powerful magnet. They finally resorted to running the disk
through the shredder.

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