Hi,
Since buying my Amiga from Ebay, I wanted to buy some old classic boxed originals of games. One of them was Syndicate which is on 4 disks.
I found that none of the 4 disks would read properly and each and every one of them were very noisy, making a rhythmic scraping sound whilst spinning. I'm guessing since none of my other disks make this noise that it's something that's happened with age, I've read on some sites that floppy disks should be kept in plastic sleeves to preserve them.
Please read through all of this first before you attempt anything and if there is anything at all you do not understand, please ask me before you proceed as you may damage your disk, I can't be held responsible for any bad results, the way I seen it though was the disks were faulty anyway so I had nothing to lose. I managed to fix every single disk and here's how I did it....
Before you try this, bare in mind that it may not work for all disks and I've only ever done it with this set of disks so there may be a chance you might not get the desired result and it may even damage your disks.
1. The first step was to examine the disks by pushing aside the metal cover and examining both sides of the floppy disk to make sure there was no dust or debris on the actual disk.
Once I confirmed it was ok, I made sure the metal cover mechanism was smooth. If I'd have found a problem here I would have dealt with that first then retested before proceeding.
2. I'm sure some expert on chemicals will warn you not to do this step, so feel free to skip it and move onto Step 3...
Next I squirted some WD40 onto a clean surface (a saucer would do), then I took a clean pen lid and used it to pick up the oil and smear a
very very fine coat of oil onto the plastic of the inside of the disk through the outer hole (Not the central hole, the one that the drive uses to spin the disk). Remember that the oil will definitely not do the material that the disk is made out of any good, so you're just trying to lubricate where the metal circle makes contact with the plastic case inside that hole. To make sure I got it all the way round, I smeared it on the furthest point from the centre and the closest point to the centre, spinning the disk with the pen lid on both areas to make sure it was evenly distributed.
3. I then took a floppy disk head cleaning kit and ran it on my drive to make sure the heads were clean.
4. Using a piece of software called DiskSalv Version 2 (By Dave Hayne), this software came with Classic Workbench.
I read the disk over and over (possibly about 15-20 times per disk) using the following settings.
- File system: OFS (When you put the disk in, the software will automatically check the File System, so just go with whatever it says)
- Mode: Validate
- Finally Press Scan
I repeated Step 4 over and over with each of the 4 disks.
I found that on the first 2-3 attempts the software showed errors, but every time I repeated it, less errors showed up in the results and the nasty noise the disk was making became less and less.
The best results came on the first 3-5 scans of each disk, but when I persevered all 4 disks were fully repaired and readable, they barely even make a noise now.
REMEMBER, before proceeding Write Protect all of the disks you'll be doing this with, as the software I used has the ability to attempt to fix disks, which would mean writing to the disk again and potentially destroying the old data creating errors.
Very happy with the results.
Following all the disk activity I used the head cleaning disk again to make sure there was no debris on the heads.
Hope this helps someone some day.
Rob.
