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Years and years of sitting around in storage. Are my disks a lost hope? I'm looking for some help and suggestions. I have hundreds of 3.5" floppy disks from my Amiga days. For the longest time, I didn't have an Amiga with a working disk drive. I also wasn't able to sucessfully adapt a modern PC floppy drive. Here's a bit of history. I retired my Amiga 500 when the floppy drive went bad and I outgrew the software I had on the installed 100MB hard drive. I put all the disks in an ordered fashion in a large cardboard box. That was back in 1996. Over the years, the box moved from one house to another and has been subject to temperature and humidity changes. Recently, I acquired an Amiga 2000 with two working floppy drives (or so I think). I pulled out a few of my old Amiga disks and tried them in the 2000. I get a spine tingling screeeechhhhing sound as the disk spins, followed by the disconcerting DF0:BAD icon. I tried a few other disks and they result in the same behavior, using both floppy drives. I proceed to look inside the drives through the front, with a flashlight, to see what may be going on. I removed a few dust bunnies from the drive, although they don't seem to have been in a position to cause the noise, or any sort of read problem. I tried a 3.5" disk cleaner and was able to read one disk with a high degree of accuracy. After trying another one, which failed, and going back to the newly working one, the working one failed to read again. This confused me. Upon examining the media under the sliding cover, I have a theory that all of the disks may have developed some sort of very thin film of debris obstructing the read heads. That coating may have reduced the sleekness of the meda surface, causing the "fingers on a chalkboard" screeching instead of a smooth floating of the read heads on the surface. I also have a theory that my original disk drive may have been out of alignment. Of course, all my disks would still work on a properly "mis-aligned" drive, but fail on a factory aligned drive. That would mean these disks would need an equally out of alignment drive to be read correctly. So, the big question now is, what do I do about it? My first plans are to remove the disk drives, open them up, and completely clean and lubricate the mechanisms. We'll see if that helps to improve disk reads. Next, I may have to find a way to clean a possible film off the disks themselves. My first idea is to use the cleaning disk case as a replacement disk shell. the cleaning disk opens up to allow the fabric disk to be removed. If I split the end of a floppy disk, I can slide the magnetic media out of it's original case and put it in the cleaning disk shell. While the media is out, I could clean it with a non residual cleaning agent or alcohol. As far as the mis-alignment theory, I have an oscilloscope. I should theoretically see the signal on the read head as it's reading and possibly adjust the head position until I get the strongest signal. Adjusting a drive using this method is a lost art. Does anybody know what the signal is supposed to look like on an oscilloscope? I'll only try to intentionally mis-align a standard PC floppy drive instead of a rare 880K Amiga drive. If I can get the PC floppy drive reading the Amiga disk with a good signal, I can try hooking up that drive to the Amiga and have a method to archive my disks. Or, I could use ADFREAD on a PC to do the trick. ADFREAD shows read errors as it tries to backup Amiga disks to .ADF files. I'll know if the alignment change is successful. Any other theories or successful experiences out there?
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1Comment
at Monday, 27 October 2008 17:44
As a matter of fact, I happen to be running into the same kinds of problems at the same time as you. I got my old machines here, and NONE of them will read, write, or format any of my disks. It starts out that I can read a few, copy, format, etc. Then, after I go through a few more disks, as if one of these disks may have been the "straw that broke the camel's back", all of a sudden, CRAP... I could really use some help, if you find out anything, please let me know.
2"Some proven tricks so far"
at Tuesday, 28 October 2008 07:54
It's a slow, arduous process that's only useful if the disks had not lost most of their magnetic integrity. Knowing first hand that my disks were in a humid environment, I knew I would have to deal with something on the magnetic surface. So, I got q-tips and some Isopropyl alcohol (92% or better) and PAINSTAKINGLY rubbed both sides of the exposed media surface with an alcohol soaked q-tip. Then I manually rotated the disk a bit and repeated until I got all the way around. For me, an eventual dirty q-tip indicated success. One q-tip per disk.
I doubt the alcohol won't hurt the read heads. The cleaning pads inside the disk will help wipe the alcohol around internally while I'm cleaning. Anything to remove or dissolve the "film" on the media surface.
I had a degree of success. The "squeaking" went away and I was able to recover about 85% of the files. It's just a very slow process. I'm only doing unique, personal files because programs and such can be
3"More tricks...."
at Tuesday, 28 October 2008 08:02
The big concern for me with a "film" on the media is that film will eventually find its way onto the drive's read heads. You might want to consider having a "sacrificial" drive for this purpose. One that will be subjected to many cleanings with a "cleaning disk" (If they're still available anywhere) or staying disassembled so manual head cleaning can be done after several disk reads.
Keeping the drive heads clean is an important part. Also, don't ignore the emulation "archives" for replacements. Most popular computers have some sort of transfer mechanism to read/write native disks. Use that to your advantage and save your restoration for personal files or files that you know aren't available on some online repository.
Most likely, you will need to buy replacement media to restore your collection. 5.25 and 3.5" disks are still available, like on eBay. Consider a successful restoration as your second (or last) chance.
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