New subject: Floppy drive cleaning [was Re: Broken floppy disks]

19 Aug 2007

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Subject: RE: Broken floppy disks
   From: Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com>
   Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:33:34 -0700 (PDT)
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>

I've had pretty good reliability with 3 1/2" disks, if
you keep the drive clean, and make sure that the disks
aren't dirty or have that "gritty" sound to them, they
typically work OK.

I typically use the fdformat (or superformat) under
Linux - you can have it format the whole disk before
going back and verifying, sometimes it might take a
pass or two before the disk verifies OK. Degaussing
the disks with a bulk eraser would be a good idea too.

But be sure that your drive is good and clean. I've
also had better luck with older floppy drives -
Mitsumi, Chinon and Teac drives seem to be very
reliable. Blow the fuzzies out before use. 
Cleaning the head after you get a bad media situation
is advised.  

...
 Also, be sure your BIOS is set right - I had a hell of
a time a couple weeks ago trying to write a disk on a
PC here, it was just a simple boot disk, but I tried
four floppies, checking the image, reformatting, etc -
then I remembered that last time I used the PC, I had
a 1.2mb 5 1/4" drive as drive 0. Bios was set wrong,
and the whole time I was trying to write data to the
disk at the wrong data rate. Doh!

-Ian 
I've had the same results with 8,5.25 and 3.5 media.
They all work well for me, I keep the drive clean
and dust bunny free and problems are rare.

I worked in a place that had a fair amount of dust and 
if I didn't clean out the 3.5" drives once every 4 
months they would destroy media. It wasn't a media 
problem it was gritty dust getting in there.

I must have over 400 3.5" floppies of both flavors 
(720/1.44) and all but 100 are recycled prior use 
media that never give trouble unless the drive was 
at fault (dust).

One comment regarding PC fans.  PCs suck air in and 
often that means through the floppy and other holes 
in the case and out through the fan.  This tend to 
dirty up everything very badly.  I have an older P166 
(workhorse system) that I reversed the fan, added a 
second fan blowing in and put simple fine mesh screens 
on the outside of both. I get far better life out of 
CPU coolers, floppies and CDrom drives as a result.
I've made this change on other machines with similar 
results.

Allison