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Old Floppy Disk Report!


XLERB

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Hi all: Not certain that anyone needs this information, but as I hauled my old TI rig out of storage, I found a bunch of 1990-era floppy disks that I had used with an old 486 PC that's long gone. I tried reformatting them for the TI using Disk Manager 2, and interestingly, most of them work. The exception seems to be mostly the Fuji Film disks. They all format very slowly with unusable sectors (anywhere from 15 to 300 are marked as "used") or the formatting stops with an error. I assume they used a cheaper magnetic coating that deteriorated over the 25 years.

 

I've had no problem with 3M, Scotch, BASF, Kodak, or any others (except Maxell). Even the Tandy disks work flawlessly. Good old Radio Shack!

 

Just thought that would be of interest in case anyone has a favorite old program on a Fuji Film disk that won't run (My copy of Freddy seems to be suffering from that). I'm looking forward to getting my TIPI so I can hopefully re-download anything that's corrupted. Everything I have was downloaded from BBS's back in the day. I even have a copy of the 80-column version of Funnelweb, even though I've never had an 80-column card. Wishful thinking, I guess, and now that ship has sailed...

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By and large, most all my old floppies still work as well. Many were heavily used back then and stored for years in their cabinets indoors. Some have trouble in one drive, but can still be read when tried in a different drive. I've been reformatting a handful and using them to make whole-disk archives for easier transfer to my PC.

 

If I hit a floppy that has a bunch of bad sectors, I shut that down as the drive head is just scrubbing back and forth, causing needless wear and tear. If left to complete the format with bad sectors mapped out, chances are it's still flaky and will fail anyway.

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2 hours ago, Tuxon86 said:

Are they DSDD (with hub ring) or HD (without hub ring)?

This is important.  486-era 5.25" disks are likely HD, which will generally not work well in a DSDD drive.  If they work at all, they will not be reliable in the long run.

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8 hours ago, Tuxon86 said:

Are they DSDD (with hub ring) or HD (without hub ring)?

Tuxon, there's no hub ring, but now that I check, they do say HD. I never knew that they might not be backward-compatible. Learn something new every day, thanks. (I also just shut down the computer to save all that scrubbing).

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14 minutes ago, Paul Fitzgerald said:

Tuxon, there's no hub ring, but now that I check, they do say HD. I never knew that they might not be backward-compatible. Learn something new every day, thanks. (I also just shut down the computer to save all that scrubbing).

HD floppies use a different magnetic coating that needs a different level of magnetism to activate.

 

 

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On 2/21/2022 at 6:38 PM, Tuxon86 said:

HD floppies use a different magnetic coating that needs a different level of magnetism to activate.

that’s interesting... kind of like those high bias tape cassettes we used to have to mess around with in our quest to get tapes to sound reasonably like vinyl records.

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  • 6 months later...

I've had quite good results using a hard drive magnet to clear floppies with bad sectors. I've had to use some old PC 5 1/4 inch disks lately, of which some of them gave me, say, a dozen or so, bad sectors.

 

After wiping them on both sides with the magnet they all format flawlessly and returns no bad sectors at all.

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