Re: Rotting 5.25 floppies

[scott@alfter.DIESPAMMERSDIE.us (Scott Alfter)]

In article <63e5ab67-91ab-4182-9936-23c015a387f9@l33g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,
bloomer_au  <bloomer@iprimus.com.au> wrote:
>Anyway... the main problem I face isn't with the 3.5s, it's with the
>5.25s. I've got 4 boxes worth of them going back to 1980, and even a
>few years ago, roughly 1 in 5, when booted, would immediately screw
>the 5.25 drive, presumably because they've become rust or mould or
>introduced some other kind of crud to the drive. I do have a cleaning
>disk but it just doesn't seem to work too well. I mean you're lucky if
>the drive is cleaned in one pass. Sometimes it would take 3 or 4. And
>then there was the time the drive never came back, and I had to go buy
>a new one on ebay.
>
>This is pretty exasperating. I have a few questions about this whole
>dirty 5.25 matter -
>
>1. How prevalent is this? Are all 5.25s getting like this due to age,
>or is it just that a lot of them haven't been touched for a decade,
>even if they've been well stored?

I have disks going back to 1985, and I've not had problems with them going
bad.  How and where were yours stored?  Mine have stayed indoors all of the
time; since 1990, they've been in the low-humidity environment that is Las
Vegas.

>2. Is there any advantage in opening the 5.25 drive up and cleaning it
>by hand, over using a cleaning diskette and isopropyl? I've never done
>this before, but there seem to be a bunch of how-to's around and if it
>can somehow restore a 5.25 that a cleaning disk can't save anymore,
>I'm willing to try it.

It sounds like you don't have anything to lose at this point.  I'd recommend
getting 91% alcohol instead of the more common 70%.  If you can get 100%
(maybe from an electronic-supply store, probably not from a drugstore), that
would be even better.  It should be fairly easy to get at the head in a Disk
II; doing the same with the half-height drives that followed can be a bit
more work as they usually had a bunch of shielding around the mechanism, but
it should still be doable.

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