OT: Old 3.5 inch floppies become unusable?

Oxidation of the head surface of the drive. Clean the drive's heads and try again. This is the most common failure point.

Another option is to buy a USB floppy. Then, you will at least be dealing with new hardware.

There are a few reasons why an old drive might have read/write issues. if it has rubber part, they can wear and cause spindle speed issues.

The motherboard connector header can get oxidation on some pins as well, making for a noise source or discontinuity.

The new $15 USB drive negates all those worries.

Then, as a first resort... Boot a Linux Live DVD (Knoppix) or such and use that to read or format or write those disks. that way, one does not have to worry as to whether Bill's crew knew what they were doing or not.

On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Feb 2013 03:10:05 -0500) it happened "P E Schoen" wrote in :

I had the same problem with 5 1/4 inch and 3.45 inch. If you store those in a slightly humid environment you get fungus growth on the disks. I rescued some by taking out the disk of the envelope or plastic, (watch the spring), and cleaning them. then you also need to clean drive heads. I still have win 3.1 and DRDOS 3.5 inch flops that no longer read back. I even bought a USB 3.5 inch drive to try to rescue some old programs I wrote, with limited success.

Contrary to whatever many people are claiming, magnetic tape and disks are a disaster for long time storage, But I have more than 10 year old CD-RW that play back no problem however, but there are bad CD DVD manufacturers and series too (do not trust big names). I no longer have a 5 1/4 drive..... I have bought new CD-R that did have fungus spots in them, brought it back to the shop, got a refund, TDK!

So ymmv. Look for layer ID and google in case of optical media.

Send them an email with an attachment.

there are other ways in besides the floppy disk: eg: send it in via the serial port. a terminal program would be best, but If you have to, convert it into a debug script and use redirection or ctty.

the hubs are mild steel , the springs and guards are stainless (except where plastic guards are used) dunno what plastic the case is possibly ABS.

I think I still have a couple of cases of American Online promotion floppies hanging around..

But your problem maybe due to a bad drive.. you may need to clean up the head transport slide shaft and head. The grease gets hard after a while and causes the head to stick. Or, you could have a couple of bad Electro caps on the drive electronics.

We have a couple of USB floppies that seem to work well.

Jamie

Get an old copy of the DOS Norton Utilities, version 4 or 4.5. There's a tool in there that revives floppy disks, and it works great. Usually you can recover the data as well as being able to continue using the disk.

It requires a real floppy controller and real DOS, though, because it does all sorts of hardware tricks.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My first guess is that your drive is all mucked up. Back about 10 years ago, (when I first got a CD burner), I read all of my floppies and was able to read and image everything back for another 20 years before that.

Another great utility is the early 1990's vintage utility set called ANADISK that was shareware back then. (I looked them up to send them a 10 year late shareware payment, and they would only sell the newest version to law enforcement. But the older distributed versions would deal with anything 1.44 Mbyte or smaller). I got it off my old collection of SIMTEL CD-ROMs, but I think the SIMTEL MS-DOS archive is still online. It will read anything that the hardware can read. Including strange stuff with different sector sizes and tracks beyond the limit. (Dos 6.x format puts strange records out on track 82).

I used it to read disk images from a Kaypro-4 (1k sectors, strange sector numbers), and wrote Perl program to read those to independent files.

Same applies to Anadisk.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

You applied Armor-All to the surfaces of the disks? They're supposed to be 100% dry.

I've seen 5.25" disks that were cloudy but perfectly OK, but every 3.5" disk looked highly polished.

If that was an internal floppy, I'd try flipping around the ribbon cable or try another connector, but sometimes the Track 0 sensor gets dusty. I don't think the index sensor ever goes bad because it's magnetic (on the motor). Another problem is that the lead screw that positions the head can get dirty from dust getting into its grease, and old grease can gum up. A lot of 3.5" drives develop bad head alignment, which can be adjusted by loosening the stepper motor and turning it very slightly. The easiest way to set the alignment is with an oscilloscope hooked to the head amplifier (may be differential test points) and adjusting for maximum amplitude while a preformatted disk is spinning (ground the select and Motor_on lines).

Are the floppies transparent when you open the shutter and look through it at a strong light? 1.44MB and 1.2MB disks have a thinner coating and are transparent brown or red, while 720KB disks are opaque because the coating is twice as thick. Contrary to some information, those 720KB disks can't be turned into reliable 1.44MB disks by simply punching an extra hole in the case.

them!

You are most likely the winner! I just purchased a box of new floppies at the Micro Center and I tried one. It came up with the same error on the Fujitsu Win95 (MSDOS7) machine and the USB drive. I had another old Compaq Armada laptop computer but it would not even boot, showing a controller error. Then I dug out a really old Samsung "portable" computer which has an orange gas plasma display and it also had the same error. But when I removed the disk, I could see a couple of fine scratches along the outer periphery of the disc surface, so it, at least, must have oxidation. I have a drive cleaner somewhere but I think these need more than just a simple cleaning.

That seems to be a good option. The only problem is that the computer I'm using for the MSDOS application (which also needs a real parallel port) does not have USB. It does have SCSI and a PCMCIA port, and a serial port so I could do a serial file transfer. I might also be able to remove the hard

drive and put it into an external USB drive enclosure, but I think most of them are for SATA and I think my machine has SCSI. Maybe this:

I found some PCMCIA floppy drives:

-Drive-/290867145726

I have another computer which has XP and a parallel port and I'm sure it can boot MSDOS but I'd need to make a dual-boot drive or boot from a CD (if the CD drive still works).

issues.

and

not

not.

Good ideas. Yeah, USB floppy drives are $15-$25. Maybe I can find my old

cleaning kit or buy a new one for $17:

Thanks,

Paul

Some of the disks were 720K as evidenced by the thicker coating and lack of the extra hole. When I held the disks up to a bright light, I could see that they were a translucent reddish tan, and I could very clearly see the damage to the surface, some worse than others.

I took the USB drive apart, and when I examined the heads they seemed OK, but upon closer inspection I could discern some imperfections on the surface. I was able to scrape the surfaces a bit and the drive was able to read the directory on one disk, but could not copy the files. The Win7 floppy drive software (in Windows Explorer) does not seem to handle disk

errors very well. It was taking forever and even though I clicked on "cancel" the window stayed open. So I opened task mangler and I closed the explorer application. But that also wiped out the entire task bar and played havoc with whatever else I had open, so I had to do a hard reboot.

Meanwhile I removed the head of the floppy drive and I think I was able to clean it better, but the head came loose from the arm and I gave up. The

surfaces appear to be made of some sort of glossy ceramic with a dark grey stripe where the magnetic gap must be. I guess I'll buy another USB drive. And I'll also see if I can set up a serial communication between the MSDOS computer and my laptop with a USB-serial converter. I think I can just set up the com port and then use Copy filename COMn

Actually, I just got out of command prompt and into Win95. It has HyperTerm! So now all I have to do is rig up a cross-connected serial cable and I should be good to go.

Paul

has a lot of archived shareware, but I haven't waded through it all.

Is this it:

Windows doesn't handle frozen folder windows very well. Trouble is, when you force explorer to close, it takes the desktop, Start bar, etc. with. Fortunately, you can easily restart it: from Task Manager, select File/New Task (Run)... and run "explorer". Windows will return.

I've also had cases where explorer self-restarts on closing. Don't know why sometimes it does and doesn't.

Tim

That's the result of the decision, moons ago, of making running the GUI under exploder.

It's automatically restarted every time I've had to close it. Scary, though.

Ten years seems to be the average data-useable lifetime of any floppy disk: 8 inch all formats from 128 byte sectors to 1.4Meg total capability, 5.25 inch all formats from 128 byte sectors to 800Kbytes total, and seemingly all 3.5 inch formats to 1836K total. The drives themselves need to be clean with "polished" heads no dirt or rust.

• Recycling is 100 percent: the metal, the plastic case, the media itself, and even the oxide mix.

If the PC motherboard does not support floppies, a USB system is the only way. And if the info is data written with the old Deleted Data sectors,you are SOL.

You should try the 2.88 variety. The idiots (all of them)stopped BIOS support for it back in 2004 (despite it NOT being a BIOS flash space issue.

Oddly, IF we had embraced *that* floppy technology, you would not be experiencing ANY data loss whatsoever.

That's probably what I'll do. It's a small text file so it could even be

edited using the MSDOS EDIT program. It can also be edited from within the MSDOS application. The file is Read Only so you need a password, but of course it can also be defeated by using ATTRIB -R.

I have Win95 on my computer with Hyperterm, and I was able to make a null modem serial connection so that I could transfer the files to my laptop. I have my own terminal emulator program TTYdemo using TCommPortDriver for Borland Delphi. Hyperterm for Win7 sucks.

I tried using CTTY and it gave a write error. I used MODE COM1:9600,N,8,1 first. I also tried COPY Filename COM1 and it hung up the command prompt. I also tried COPY CON: COM1 and when I typed Ctrl-Z to end it I also got a

write error. Maybe TYPE Filename > COM1 will work, but I may need to add the Ctrl-Z somehow. I'd like to know how to do it under MSDOS, but Hyperterm

seems like the most convenient way.

I found a place that recycles them but mostly they clean them up and reuse them.

I can probably put them in with the electronic/computer recycling at the

local landfill. I'll get new USB drive and see if my other disks are usable. There are probably only 20-30 that are shot.

Thanks,

Paul

perhaps convert the file into a series of

ECHO line of text >>filename

and paste that into the CTTY session.

By default, I think DOS cared about the flow control lines. If your null modem cable only has TXD, RXD, and ground, that's probably why it's hanging. You may need to tie them high or low as appropriate. I think the Win9x "DOS" had options to MODE to tell it to ignore the flow control lines, but I don't remember if real DOS did.

Note that MODE has the somewhat annoying property of changing more than what you told it to change. For instance, if you had the port set up exactly the way you wanted at 9600 bps, and then decided you wanted it at 4800 bps, just saying "MODE COM1: 4800" tends to change more than the bit rate - it might flip around the parity, stop bits, etc as well. The fix is to issue a single MODE command containing all the options you need.

I used to use Telix as a communications program on DOS. It supports plain ASCII, X, Y, and Zmodem file transfer. It was a shareware knockoff of the commercial Procomm product.

Standard disclaimers apply; I don't get money or other consideration from any companies mentioned.

Matt Roberds

I recovered a lot of floppies which could not be read initially.

I carefully opened them, washed the disc with mild soad and water, dried them thoroughly, reassembled them putting tape to hold the pieces together. The hed also required cleaining.

And then I was able to copy the disc.

Hope you can try this, naturally at your risk.