Question about floppy disks

[Legerdemain]

discover day by day that the old dd disks falling apart.. but the new hd floppys of today they are not good and dropping down dead quickly too...

This I've never understood. It's extremely rare for me that my floppies break down. I got floppies closer to being 15 years old that still works like a charm. I've never bothered about taking "good care" of them, having had them lying on the TV-set , on my speakers and pretty much everywhere where they shouldn't be (that is, when they have been outside the floppy-storage-box or whatever you call it in english).

I recently cleaned out my collection of floppies. Formating each one of those that I had no use of any longer, just to check their integrity. About 100 DD floppies, and 80 HD ones, that I had used with my various Amigas through the years.

I would guess that something like 10 of those 100 DD floppies were broken... and of those 10 that were broken most of them had once been forgotten outside in a car, over night, in freezing winter (of course also some old A500 floppies had checksum errors on some of the files, but back then it seemed enough to write to a floppy once to get it 'not validated', but the floppies themselves weren't broken).

Out of the 80 HD floppies that I had used with my Amiga maybe 2 or 3 where broken (I formated the HD floppies in my PC since I don't have a HD drive in my Amiga).

But then came the funny part. I also formated like 20 HD floppies that I had used with my various PC's during the years. I would say that well over half of them were broken.

The floppies I've kept without formating them, I've not kept because of their content, but because of their, to me, nostalgic worth. Looking at some of those old A500 floppies and their ugly, by me, written labels makes me smile. I just can't toss them away (or format them, removing the labels and putting them in my "ready to use" pile, like I did with the other disks).

To sum it all up, I am generally not using floppies much. I use them Sometimes when I find no other way than writing something to floppies to get it working, or quickly transfering something to a non-networked computer.

I once thought that ZIP-Drives were nice, 'cause I had one and they had some at my school aswell. Unfortunately most of the time the ZIP-floppies I took to school couldn't be read there and when I took them home again I realised that the files on them had become broken. Same thing happened when I tried transfering files between me and my friends (and my friends with ZIP-drives generally had much trouble with them aswell). So I got rid of my ZIP-drive. Never looked back.

Pretty silly of me to consider the 5.25" drive, I've installed in my PC a while back, the coolest thing my PC has to offer. Just for the fun of it I sometimes put some important documents on my 5.25" disks, and later accessing those files when friends are visiting, just to see the looks on their faces. But then, again, I've never been sane. Honestly.

 

[Legerdemain]

I'm just wondering though if floppies with read/write errors can be 'cured' with a Full Format. Does this re-align the magnetic particles?

Depends on why you have gotten those read/write errors. If it is a big chunk of tar that you have managed to get inside the floppy, I suspect no one in the world could get it working again. =)

I do things in steps... when I've discovered a read/write error the first thing I do is to manually open the dustcover on the floppy... then I rotate the "disk" while blowing on the exposed parts, on both sides. Then I try reading the disk again, and quite often that helps (it might just be some dust that have reached the disk). If someone says that it is stupid to do this, well, then I can only say that I have never managed to make a disk more "broken" than it was before I blew on it. =)

If that doesn't help, then I try to format the floppy, which in most of the times works, but every now and then some floppy starts to sound "schreeeeeeeewd, schreeeeeeewd". If so, I just try to format it a couple of times, and, just like in most previous cases, after a couple of tries it works just fine again. To ensure this I've tried reading and writing files (not just once, but many times with each particular floppy) to some selected floppies that I've formated this way, and they haven't shown any signs of becoming "broken" again.

Note: I seldom use floppies and thus I seldom do what I've described above. The only reason that I've developed this method above is because I was pretty into trying what could, and couldn't, be done when I was younger. If someone said a floppy would become broken if lying on the TV-set, well, then I had to put it on the TV-set to see if this was true. If someone said it wasn't good to try to "blow" away dust that had reached the disk, then I had to try it. And so on. Etc. Etc. Etc.