10 Apr
2007
10 Apr
'07
1:39 p.m.
On 10 Apr 2007 at 13:14, Jules Richardson wrote:
Out of interest, do you always do this for
"unknown" media as a matter of
course - or would you normally read a single track between index pulses, do
some software analysis to see what it is, and then go back to re-read more
than a single disk revolution?
Unknown media that is fairly old--yes--I record 2 revs worth and sort
it all out later. Known media, is a different matter.
In reality I've not seen many floppies (at least
not 5.25") fail spectacularly
- but I have come across a few.
Oh, I can name a few "spectacular" brands that have been sent with
"see through" tracks already on them. It seems that at least with
some drives, fouling the head results in increased damage to any
diskettes you might subsequently read.
For reading, I've toyed a bit with the thought of using a non-contact
head, maybe like a bernoulli box. But musing is as far as I've
gotten.
I put a dual 90MB drive up on eBay and got no interest; maybe I
should look into tearing into one of the drives...
Cheers,
Chuck