Broken floppy disks

[Chuck Guzis]

On 19 Aug 2007 at 15:31, Ade Vickers asked:

> .... are 3.5" 1.44MB floppies just inherently useless?

Once written, 3.5" DSHD floppies seem to retain their information 
well enough; they just don't like being rewritten.  Degaussing 
sometimes helps temporarily reclaim a floppy for another use.

If you search the list archives, you've heard me rant on this 
subject.  The short answer is "pretty much".  I've been able to 
recycle a number of bad 1.44MB by covering over the density-indicator 
aperture and using them as 720K.  But even that doesn't work on all 
of them.  

On the other hand, the failure rate of 720K DS2D diskettes is 
substantially lower than that of DSHD.

If you place the floppy on a tabletop so that the exposed hub faces 
down, they make decent coasters on which to place drinks.  I suppose 
one could use the disks to shim up a leg on a wobbly table.  Like old 
CDs, I'm always looking for new uses for 3.5" floppies.

For what it's worth, I've had the same experience as you with 5.25" 
floppies--they tend to hold onto data better.  Last week, I got a 
conversion job in where a number of 5.25" DSHD diskettes were 
mistakenly written 20 years ago in a Kaypro 10.  I had a bad feeling 
in my gut about that--5.25 HD media differs considerably in its 
magnetic characteristics from 2D media.  Yet I encountered only a 
single read error--and that was in a backup file.  Out of the 300 
diskettes on that job so far, I've yet to encounter another 
unrecoverable error--and many of the diskettes have obviously been 
recycled from other uses.

8" floppies tend to be even more tenacious than 5.25".  I routinely 
process media that was written more than 30 years ago without 
problems.

Cheers,
Chuck