Broken floppy disks

On 19 Aug 2007 at 15:31, Ade Vickers asked: Once written, 3.5" DSHD floppies seem to retain their information well enough; they just don't like being rewritten. Degaussing sometimes helps temporarily reclaim a floppy for another use. If you search the list archives, you've heard me rant on this subject. The short answer is "pretty much". I've been able to recycle a number of bad 1.44MB by covering over the density-indicator aperture and using them as 720K. But even that doesn't work on all of them. On the other hand, the failure rate of 720K DS2D diskettes is substantially lower than that of DSHD. If you place the floppy on a tabletop so that the exposed hub faces down, they make decent coasters on which to place drinks. I suppose one could use the disks to shim up a leg on a wobbly table. Like old CDs, I'm always looking for new uses for 3.5" floppies. For what it's worth, I've had the same experience as you with 5.25" floppies--they tend to hold onto data better. Last week, I got a conversion job in where a number of 5.25" DSHD diskettes were mistakenly written 20 years ago in a Kaypro 10. I had a bad feeling in my gut about that--5.25 HD media differs considerably in its magnetic characteristics from 2D media. Yet I encountered only a single read error--and that was in a backup file. Out of the 300 diskettes on that job so far, I've yet to encounter another unrecoverable error--and many of the diskettes have obviously been recycled from other uses. 8" floppies tend to be even more tenacious than 5.25". I routinely process media that was written more than 30 years ago without problems. Cheers, Chuck