8 inch floppies, decaying

[Adrian Graham]

Hi folks,

Tonight I got my imaging PC to successfully read some of the 8” disks from my CPT8500 word processor using one of its own Tandon TM848-01 drives, sadly it seems the boot disk is toast but I’ve been able to dump some of the data disks as well as the Utilities. Since I have a box of unused disks I thought I’d try writing back an image but got a lot of CRC errors. Closer inspection of the disk itself shows this - http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/8inchFloppyImaging-7.jpg <http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/8inchFloppyImaging-7.jpg> - which looks like damp.

Is it actually the magnetic coating breaking down? Dare I attempt cleaning?

Just for another test I tried reading some of my DEC diagnostic floppies since I hoped they were RX01 format, but they error constantly so they must be RX02s.

Still, it was good to see the drive spring into life :)

-- 
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
t: @binarydinosaurs    f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
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