[C64] 5.25 inch floppys -- time-efficient way of integrity check?

[Herbarius]

So, I've got a whole bunch of floppies for the C64 (lots of unlabled or poorly labled ones), I've transferred all the contents to my PC using the XM1541 cable and now I basically have all these disks (I haven't counted, around 200) which can all be erased.

 

Of course they're already getting old, so I would really like to check them for integrity, to throw out all that aren't good anymore and also as a kind of curiosity, so I could try and see how well they did up over the years

 

I've already done a "visual examination" of the whole bunch, discarding all with obvious visible damage to the disk shell (like carved in handwriting ). I also thought of maybe discarding all disks, which make unusually much noise when spinning - I think you know what I mean. fffffft ffffffft ffffffft...

 

I already tried the "Check Disk" program from the 1541 test/demo disk, but if I use that I'll be doing that forever, it takes nearly an hour for a disk (only one side)!

 

So, any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

 

Oh, and while we are at it... Some of the disks are labeled as single-sided, but obviously have been used double sided anyway. What are your experiences with that "technique", how reliable are such disks. and is there any danger that writing on one side could damage data on the other?

Edited February 19, 2010 by Herbarius

[Rybags]

I've generally not had problems with using notched disks as DS.

 

But, that means that the fibrous tissue crap inside gets dragged back and forward, rather than settling into the one direction. Quite possibly the cause of the "Pfft, fft" type noise we all know.

Also, many floppies in the day were only SS certified. But (could be wrong here), I think the Atari drives use the "not certified" side anyway.

 

Verifying the disks with default C= tools is not only slow, but you also have the fact that the drive tends to only use the first 35 tracks or so.

 

A better way might be to just format each one on an Atari using a 1050 drive. At least then, it's fairly quick and does a write and verify pass of the entire 40 tracks.

[Herbarius]

A better way might be to just format each one on an Atari using a 1050 drive. At least then, it's fairly quick and does a write and verify pass of the entire 40 tracks.

Unfortunately I don't have an Atari computer, nor the drive

 

However, that helped me to an idea: I still have some 5.25" PC drives around, as well as systems which could use them, even my current PC could use it. Do you think I can use that? They are, however, high density drives (1.2 MB), also on the PC it used both sides at once, instead of having independent sides and flipping the disk like with the C1541...

 

 

My other idea was creating disk images with WinVICE which contain a disk filled with random data. Maybe even a second disk image, containing the same data, but with the bits reversed.

Then using d64copy to write those to the disk, and afterwars reading them again, and comparing the files. Repeat with the second disk image.

But, well, before I reivent the wheel I wanted some second opinions

Edited February 19, 2010 by Herbarius