Dog Cow
Well-known member
Last night I had the hair-raising experience of shredding/scratching the outer tracks off a couple of 3.5" floppies to the point where all the magnetic media was GONE from the disk and I could see through it clearly. I've seen countless scratched disks before, but never any this bad!
Needless to say, it wrecked my drive heads (800K) so I had to disassemble and clean them to get the drive going again.
I noticed that of the disks that were destroyed, they were either Maxell (black shell) disks or they were Verbatim (blue shell). They were 800K DS/DD disks from 1986-87.
Amazingly, I was able to copy all the data from one of these shredded disks, with exception of System/Finder, because these two files were stored at the outer (and now obliterated) tracks.
Anyone else had this happen? Any patterns with which brand(s) of disk are failing most often? Sony disks seem to be holding up OK.
Don't try this at home: I've been applying one or two drops per side of isopropyl alcohol to the disk surface to act as a dual cleaning disk that cleans both the drive head and the disk surface. This has helped me get good reads off a handful of disks. This technique works, but you need to be super careful to limit the amount you put on otherwise you'll saturate the pad inside the disk shell and there will be trouble.
PS: If you have disks stored in the little clear plastic, flimsy envelopes, they're just a container for dust and mold and mildew stuff and chances are those disks will have read errors until you clean them with the above procedure. I did that, and threw out the plastic envelopes.
Needless to say, it wrecked my drive heads (800K) so I had to disassemble and clean them to get the drive going again.
I noticed that of the disks that were destroyed, they were either Maxell (black shell) disks or they were Verbatim (blue shell). They were 800K DS/DD disks from 1986-87.
Amazingly, I was able to copy all the data from one of these shredded disks, with exception of System/Finder, because these two files were stored at the outer (and now obliterated) tracks.
Anyone else had this happen? Any patterns with which brand(s) of disk are failing most often? Sony disks seem to be holding up OK.
Don't try this at home: I've been applying one or two drops per side of isopropyl alcohol to the disk surface to act as a dual cleaning disk that cleans both the drive head and the disk surface. This has helped me get good reads off a handful of disks. This technique works, but you need to be super careful to limit the amount you put on otherwise you'll saturate the pad inside the disk shell and there will be trouble.
PS: If you have disks stored in the little clear plastic, flimsy envelopes, they're just a container for dust and mold and mildew stuff and chances are those disks will have read errors until you clean them with the above procedure. I did that, and threw out the plastic envelopes.
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