8 inch floppies, decaying

[Richard Pope]

Steve, Adrian,
     I am pretty certain that alcohol will break down the binders and 
remove the oxide.  Since the bad disc was run through the drive the 
head/heads should be cleaned before any more read or write attempts are 
made otherwise more discs will be damaged.
Thanks,
rich!

On 7/10/2018 8:25 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote:
> Adrian said:
>> 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?
>
> If it was me I certainly would attempt cleaning, after all it was unreadable anyway. Perhaps try cleaning a test area with a cotton bud (Q-tip)
> and isopropyl alcohol. If the stuff comes off without oxide removal then I'd slice the top edge off the jacket to remove (with clean disposable
> gloves on a lint-free surface) and clean the whole disc and finally put into a clean jacket.
>
> Steve.
>
>