Things you learn when backing up 30-year-old floppies

[Starman]

Hi all,

This is an extension of my BOOT ERROR thread which isn't very relevant anymore, now that the drives have been fixed.

 

My SIO2PC (USB) came in today and it's working great. I've been backing up all the floppies I had from around '84-'87 and everything was working fine. "I have beaten you, oxide corrosion!". Well, that was until I got to a batch of generic discs. Before I talk about that, let me break down the types of floppies I have.

 

Janus

Maxell (my favorite labels)

Wabash

Datalife

Verbatim

3M

Mensa Media

Generic

 

Of the brand-named labels, only 2 out of about 80 brand-name disks (so far) are bad. Of the generic one, only 3 out of about 25 (so far) are bad. I still have a couple of hundred to go, but I have vague recollections of wondering how long the generic disks will last. Looks like we know.

 

[_The Doctor__]

remember to clean the heads and let them dry after any number of great looking disks, every so many after less than perfect disks, and after every attempt of a nasty disk. I any disk fails for any reason give it a cleaning and the drive head a cleaning as well.

[Starman]

Ugh, too late to edit and I typed too fast. I meant to say 3/25 of the generics were GOOD.

[576XE]

IMHO,

I think that we all keep Atari media in right place.

My disks is workable after 30 years!

 

I think that only temperature influence (like with humans,.. right?) can mixed up data (After temperature mixing they can NOT produce natural data.).

 

I think that trying to amplify low signals to slightly more power is the decision in some case.

 

We need Compander-Expander scheme to trying restore our data.

[Rybags]

Only 3 of 25 generics good is a pretty below par result.

 

I have numerous floppies that are budget label jobs as well as plenty of decent ones. Not that I've read them in at least 4 years but from memory the failure rate was maybe 2-3 times as bad on the generics. Although of probably 200 disks I doubt more than several have problems.

[+Nezgar]

I pulled out all my disks and Atari8 stuff from the closet a couple weeks ago and have begun the laborious process of scopying from disk to ATR via SIO2PC-USB. A chunk of my disks got 'submerged' in a basement flood about 15 years ago, which was depressing, as there really is no way to 'air them out' properly... so I left them, and here we are today trying to read them, Many of them have a very visible film of dried water deposits with a very visible pattern of the mesh inside the sleeve. Add to that I only have 2 of 5 working 1050's now, and my happy upgraded one was one of them.

 

Anywho, I've managed to clean up my only other DD capable 1050 which has a US Doubler, and have been going through them disk by disk. I have been able to get some disks 'past the bad sectors' by applying a little extra pressure on the top-pad inside the drive with my finger at those points... Helps a bit with cleaning the head with IPA, but what really helps is cleaning thie DISK with IPA! Douse a qtip, then rub up and down inside the window... rotate a little, repeat until you've gone all the way around on both sides and gradually the bad sectors will slowly drop to 0...

 

I managed to recover my happy board from the dead 1050 and moved it into a 'working' 1050, but i think the water has damaged something on the board as it will work fine for a few minutes, then crap out, not respond, only partially initialize on power-on or nothing at all, but it was able to read some disks better while it was working. I was relieved the drive still worked when switched back to stock roms.

 

Forced to use the USDoublered drive, I learned something new I never realized in the past without the sector number display that AspeQt/APE gives you... SpartaDOS SCOPY is able to read non US-Skewed disks at ultra-speed because it actually reads the sectors out of order - which is visible when they are writing to APE. very cool! Never seen any other copy program do that, they are all sequential, which is perfectly fine on the Happy drive I was used to.

 

so I've ordered some new happy's from Atarimax! Looking fwd to that. Now onto the other 100 disks....

[+Allan]

I pulled out all my disks and Atari8 stuff from the closet a couple weeks ago and have begun the laborious process of scopying from disk to ATR via SIO2PC-USB. A chunk of my disks got 'submerged' in a basement flood about 15 years ago, which was depressing, as there really is no way to 'air them out' properly... so I left them, and here we are today trying to read them, Many of them have a very visible film of dried water deposits with a very visible pattern of the mesh inside the sleeve. Add to that I only have 2 of 5 working 1050's now, and my happy upgraded one was one of them.

 

Anywho, I've managed to clean up my only other DD capable 1050 which has a US Doubler, and have been going through them disk by disk. I have been able to get some disks 'past the bad sectors' by applying a little extra pressure on the top-pad inside the drive with my finger at those points... Helps a bit with cleaning the head with IPA, but what really helps is cleaning thie DISK with IPA! Douse a qtip, then rub up and down inside the window... rotate a little, repeat until you've gone all the way around on both sides and gradually the bad sectors will slowly drop to 0...

 

I managed to recover my happy board from the dead 1050 and moved it into a 'working' 1050, but i think the water has damaged something on the board as it will work fine for a few minutes, then crap out, not respond, only partially initialize on power-on or nothing at all, but it was able to read some disks better while it was working. I was relieved the drive still worked when switched back to stock roms.

 

Forced to use the USDoublered drive, I learned something new I never realized in the past without the sector number display that AspeQt/APE gives you... SpartaDOS SCOPY is able to read non US-Skewed disks at ultra-speed because it actually reads the sectors out of order - which is visible when they are writing to APE. very cool! Never seen any other copy program do that, they are all sequential, which is perfectly fine on the Happy drive I was used to.

 

so I've ordered some new happy's from Atarimax! Looking fwd to that. Now onto the other 100 disks....

Good luck at saving what you can.

 

Allan

[Starman]

Well, the good thing is that the bad disks were just games. It's not like I lost anything significant. The only problematic disk I have with personal info on it is one that was screwed up years ago with a 164 error. I have a listing on paper of it, but I'm checking the sectors now to see what I can salvage. Also, that disk has a deleted file of something else I worked on. Why I didn't make backups of these I'll never know. The good thing is that I have all the raw data I used to make these files, so maybe someday I'll reconstruct it all.

 

I tried an app (don't remember the name) last night and it said the file was not recoverable.

 

I put all the bad discs aside and will be re-trying them with my other 1050 after I do the first run.

[+bf2k+]

Steve Tucker's PRO System is a good way to recover. You can tell it to retry bad sectors multiple times. Usually works.

[DavidMil]

I've found that the disks without rings had the highest failure rate and that means all the Atari label diskettes.

Also I've discovered that a disk inside a jacket that has turned brown is usually bad. I guess the brown is rust

from the 'guts' bleeding out the disk.

 

David Milsop