When I extracted most of my library, I had similar issues. Neither drive in my original duo-disk could read anything. Tried two controller cards, another duo-disk and a single floppy drive. I remember reading somewhere that there are oils in the disk that seep to the surface with age. These oils and other debris collect on the disk heads.
I opened the drive and gave it the full q-tip and alcohol treatment, which allowed me to read a few more disks, then back to errors again. I then tried a 5 1/4 disk cleaning kit (the one that looks like a floppy disk) with some alcohol which cleaned the heads enough for a few more disks. The cleaning kit was sufficient to solve the problem without disassembling the unit.
The solution was clean heads, extract a few disks until you get errors, then clean again. Rinse, repeat. This process, although time consuming helped me recover about 75% of my collection.
-BZ On 10/19/2011 12:37 AM, jacobst wrote:
in the 80s I had an Apple II+. with a disk II drive. (Actually still have it, but it is boxed up). I wanted to get back into the Apple stuff, so I bought a IIgs on eBay that came with a duo disk. After setting up the IIgs, I am finding that most of my old 5.25 disks (not all) are not readable by the duo disk unit. the ones that work seem to work very reliably, but for the ones that don't, I am lucky if I can get a catalog listing on them once in several tries. I am not sure if it is the duo disk not working, or if it is just the floppies are just too old. How can I tell if the problem is the duo disk unit, or the floppies being too old? What is the life expectancy of the data on the floppy disks? Are there any options on getting these old floppies to read so I can get the data off? Thanks.