8 Jan
2023
8 Jan
'23
7:41 p.m.
On 1/8/23 19:29, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
When reading old floppies, how often is it advisable
to clean the drive? I managed the first 3.5” floppies no problem, I’m using a USB Floppy
Drive hooked up to my Mac Laptop, I was able to image them using “Disk Utility”. The next
two floppies have had errors. Though I think I was able to successfully copy all the
files off the one.
Also, what is floppy drive cleaning fluid made of, and how well does it age? I know I’ve
got at least a couple cleaning floppies around here, but they’re *OLD*.
I avoid Disk Utility like the plague.
dd works great, although MacOS's device naming is stupid. "diskutil
list" will show you what the floppy device is, and "sudo diskutil
unmountdisk diskX" will free it for imaging.
If you can source a Blue Pill, though, you can handwire it to a
floppy drive and run the greaseweazle tools...
https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/Blue-Pill-Direct
Good luck!
Doc