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Re: Take1 Movies
Michael J. Mahon wrote:
bill.martens@gmail.com wrote:
I have 10 disks which will go in the mail to you tomorrow Mike. If
nothing else, they will make great throwing disks for KFest.
I hope not! ;-)
I'll let you know when they arrive, and what progress I make.
Hi, Bill!
I'm about to leave for a week (Thanksgiving visit with family),
so I thought I'd give you a brief update on the disks you sent.
Thay arrived last Wednesday, and I've had a chance to set up a
"quaranteen" disk drive and take a look at several of them.
(On the chance that mold is contagious--and I suspect it can be--
I never put potentially moldy disks into any drive but my quaranteen
drive, and it is used for nothing else.)
It looks like 80% of the disks are just suffering from surface
dirt/mold, and when the surface is cleaned, they work fine--or at
least well enough to allow the data to be read from them.
My cleaning method depends on the extent of the foreign matter
contamination.
If the dirt is pretty localized, I use a Q-tip with a drop of
Windex to clean the area carefully through a head window or index
hole.
If much of the surface is contaminated, I slit the top of the
diskette sleeve and carefully remove the media. I then clean it
resting on a glass plate with soft tissue and Windex, drying it
with another tissue. I then reinsert it into a clean sleeve.
(I often find that a contaminated disk is the result of some
liquid (coffee, cola?) seeping into the sleeve lining, making
it a source of further problems.)
About 20% of disks still have persistent data errors after a
good cleaning. The errors are often isolated, and affect few
sectors. Usually, these sectors are either unused, or are used
for DOS, and so the disks can still be fully recovered.
This experience so far has reinforced my belief that most disks
that "go bad" are not suffering from any magnetic flaws, but
simply mechanical flaws which are mostly apparent to the eye.
Back when disks were all "new", I had noticed only one unformattable
disk in a couple of hundred, and, out of three examples, all three
had physical defects (like creases) which accounted for the problem.
More later, when I get a chance to persue this further...
-michael
Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."