Andy McFadden wrote:
Scott Alfter <salfter@salfter.diespammersdie.dyndns.org> wrote:I'd like to archive all of my floppies to CD-ROM at some point (probably don't have enough stuff to even fill a CD, let alone a DVD) anyway, but I don't think they're all going to start going bad anytime soon.I found bad blocks on about 5% of disk sides when I did my archiving pass several years ago. Most of the bad blocks were in the boot area. I think I only lost data on one or two out of 500 sides. It would be a good idea to do it sooner rather than later.
I'm curious, Andy--did you try reading them on two different drives, and, if so, were the errors "stable"? The biggest problem I've seen with old diskettes are those that were apparently stored in a damp environment or had a particularly tasty coating--some grow little rings of mold that actually gets into the oxide. I've been able to read most of these after cleaning, but I expect that they render the pressure pad "contageous" to other disks, so I use a "quarantine" disk drive and keep other disks away from that drive and, of course, the moldy disks. ;-) -michael 8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/