10 Apr
2007
10 Apr
'07
2:20 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
It's a case of stopping and cleaning the drive heads as soon as it happens...
and cleaning the drive heads after accessing *every* different disk in the
same batch, as it's reasonable to assume that storage conditions could be a
factor and other disks in the same pile will be prone to failing in the same
way. :-(
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...
Interesting. I see maybe three or four such drives offered on the local (UK)
freecycle list each year. I think I've got a couple in the attic, just because
I thought I might need them some day.
cheers
Jules