Aargh! Floppy disk help please!!

[Apostrophe]

Hi,

Right now, I have one of my SEs on. The one I have on is the one whose hard drive needs reformatting due to the fact that it takes 1 min 40 secs to load programs like Microsoft Word. Anyway, I turned it on to make backups of the stuff I want to keep. And every floppy disk I put in is annoying the heck out of me!

Okay, a while ago I posted here about most of the 800k floppy disks in my room becoming unreadable. But this is becoming ridiculous. They are failing left and right, even brand new ones. Most floppies I put in flash up a dialog box asking if I want to initialize this unreadable disk. And every time I click Yes, I get the message "Initialization Failed!" And I was wondering: is there a chance that the floppy drive of that SE is destroying disks?

I'd have a whole stack of 800k disks in my hand, feeding them in one at a time. In a stack of 10 disks, 3 would work. But here's the real stumper: they fail while in the SE. The disk icon would be on the desktop, and I'd be surfing through the hard drive for folders small enough to fit on the disk, and then, all of a sudden, the icon vanishes and I get a message telling me that "the disk can no longer be used by your Macintosh." It ejects.

So I have two questions here: 1) is it possible for a floppy drive to destroy disks? and 2) is there anything I can do to the damaged floppy disks to get them readable again?

This is driving me crazy!!! Please help!!!

-Apostrophe

EDIT: A sudden thought: does this sound like the symptoms of a dirty drive head?

 

[Mac128]

Right now, I have one of my SEs on. The one I have on is the one whose hard drive needs reformatting due to the fact that it takes 1 min 40 secs to load programs like Microsoft Word. ... Okay, a while ago I posted here about most of the 800k floppy disks in my room becoming unreadable. But this is becoming ridiculous. They are failing left and right, even brand new ones. ... So I have two questions here: 1) is it possible for a floppy drive to destroy disks? and 2) is there anything I can do to the damaged floppy disks to get them readable again?

At the risk of repeating questions from a previous post, do you have another known good 800K drive? The answer to your first question is YES! Floppy drives destroy disks all the time. You should definitely confirm a disk in a known good drive before you possibly destroy any more disks. As for question 2, it depends on what, if anything the drive is doing to them. Norton Utilities and others had some pretty good HFS floppy recovery utilities. However, the drive needs to be functioning perfectly before you can use them. If they were 400K disks and they have been damaged, it is almost impossible to recover them as I have yet to find an MFS recovery software that is intuitive enough for me to use. Another possibility is that any number of floppy related chips on the logicboard are bad and are causing the problems. In which case your disks are likely fine. Until you get a KNOWN GOOD drive and system, it would be hard to say exactly where the problem lays without potentially destroying more disks.

Have you posted about your hard drive problem before? Has anyone suggesting the SCHD interleave formatting? The SE uses a 2:1 and the Plus uses a 3:1. All other systems use a 1:1. If your drive is not formatted 2:1 then it would take a lot longer to access the information from the drive than it should.

 

[JRL]

Try the disks in question on your Centris 610 and see if they are readable.

 

[tomlee59]

Floppies can fail, or seem to fail, for many reasons. Some are:

1) The oxide layer (the brown stuff) has flaked off because of age.

2) The oxide layer has been abraded off (e.g., by a scratched or dirty head).

3) The drive that wrote the data is misaligned relative to the drive that is reading the data.

4) The drive trying to read the data has a dirty head or heads.

5) The mechanism that "loads" the heads onto the disk surface is balky, leading to poor contact. The grease that lubricates the mechanism often turns to glue over time. The fix is to remove the old junk, replace with new lube.

6) A head has been mauled, leading to an "azimuthal" misalignment that cannot be repaired in most cases.

7) Media-detect switches have failed or gotten stuck, misidentifying the media type to the OS.

8) The "disk is inserted" switch has failed or gotten stuck, failing to let the OS know that a disk has been inserted.

9) The spindle motor can fail (either completely, or simply run at the wrong speed).

10) The head assembly motor can fail.

11) The cable assembly can be flaky.

12) The power supply voltages can be out of spec.

And the list above is hardly exhaustive (but exhausting to read, perhaps).

 

[Dog Cow]

The biggest cause I've found with floppy failure is temperature, especially for Apple II 5.25" disks. If the disks are not stored in a warm room (such as a bedroom where you sleep) then you may need to give them a few minutes to warm up.

 

[Charlieman]

13. Floppy disks literally get mouldy. The magnetic media attracts spores when disks are stored in an attic or garage that is warm and humid. I have no idea whether the spores are attracted to the iron or similar in the floppy media, or to other aspects of a floppy disk.

The first time that I observed the problem was when making backups of twenty year old Apple II disks. I ended up using a bare Apple II drive on the bench for "source" to make copies.

 

[wally]

14. There are six aluminum electrolytic capacitors visible on the Sony "2MB" floppy drive I happen to have just inspected. Does your particular drive have any? Perhaps one or more of them have reached end of life.