Re: Rotting 5.25 floppies

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

bloomer_au wrote:
> I fired up my IIGS last night after probably its longest hiatus ever
> (about 3 years I'd guess). The 3.5 inch was a bit frosty - after I put
> in Silpheed, the eject button wasn't working. It didn't even work when
> I paper clipped it. Then suddenly the disk ejected after about 30
> seconds. After that the eject button worked fine. Maybe the contact
> needed the scraping it got by me pressing it a bunch?

More likely the lubricant in the mechanism has "set up", and the
combination of warming up and the eject motor straining against
it eventually caused the mechanism to break free.

It will probably continue to work unless it is unused for a while,
but this symptom indicates that a tear down, cleaning, and relubrication
is in this drive's future.

> 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.
>
> Last night, after I played some Savage Island Part I, I put in a
> different 5.25, and it did the screwing my drive routine.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this...  Do you mean that after
running this disk, disks that previously worked stop working?

> 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?

If they are stored in moderate temperature and a dry environment, they
should hold up quite well.

If there is a problem with the diskettes, it should be easily seen by
close visual inspection through the head window.  The *bottom* of the
disk is the side that the Apple II drive reads, though in the case of
dirt or mold, both sides should be clean to avoid cross-contaminating
other disks.

If the disk surface looks clean, then it probably is.

> 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.

I've found that slitting or carefully cutting the top of the diskette
sleeve and removing the disk media, then *carefully* wiping it (while
supported by a clean, flat glass or porcelain surface) with a Windex-
moistened soft paper towel does wonders for even the most crufty
diskettes.

After cleaning both sides--and cleaning the glass/porcelain surface
between sides--the media can be reinserted into a new (slit) sleeve
and copied to a new diskette.

> Mostly it seems too precarious to go playing my 5.25 games. I think I
> am just going to have to limit myself to getting all my important data
> off 5.25s (assuming they aren't rotted, too) and only after that's
> done can I risk going around putting in any old disk I'd like.

I'd first suspect the drive you are using.  Make sure that it is clean
and properly lubricated, and that the belt is not stiffened in its
storage position (causing a significant speed variation as the disk
rotates).

Drives tend to age less gracefully than diskettes when both are
properly stored.  In the case of drives, long disuse leads to problems.
Another case of "use it or lose it"!

-michael

AppleCrate: An Apple II "blade server"!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."