Floppy recovery

[Warner Losh]

Attempting to read floppies with the wrong kind of drive can also
cause damage. Back in the day, people were all aflutter about
drive rings and how having them or not having them caused
damage when they read the floppy in a 'foreign' setting. There
were rumors about head clearance and such also being an issue
when newer drives were used to read older floppies, but I never
could find someone that was actually affected by it.

Warner

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 2:07 PM, Terry Stewart <terry at webweavers.co.nz>
wrote:

> >200 disks, especially if they weren't in great shape, can take some time.
> I assume they wanted full data recovery using all possible means,
> >plus conversion of all the documents to a modern format.
>
> With one-of-a-kind stuff, you don't have the luxury of experimenting and
> playing around with it. You have to make sure you aren't
> >destroying them further while trying to read them- sometimes you only get
> one chance and the mylar coating comes right off. After that, it's over.
>
> Fair point.  Thinking further on it, it would be a softly, softly approach.
>
> Terry (Tez)
>
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 10:03 AM, peter <peter at rittwage.com> wrote:
>
> > On 2016-01-05 15:56, Terry Stewart wrote:
> >
> >> I wonder how it could take them three months to figure something out.
> >>>
> >> Maybe Chuck can comment.
> >>
> >> Yes, I would have thought an old MSDOS machine with a 360k 5.25 inch
> >> floppy
> >> drive plus Chuck's 22DISK program and the job could have been done in a
> >> day?  Might be more too it than it seems maybe...
> >>
> >> Terry (Tez)
> >>
> >
> > 200 disks, especially if they weren't in great shape, can take some time.
> > I assume they wanted full data recovery using all possible means, plus
> > conversion of all the documents to a modern format.
> >
> > With one-of-a-kind stuff, you don't have the luxury of experimenting and
> > playing around with it. You have to make sure you aren't destroying them
> > further while trying to read them- sometimes you only get one chance and
> > the mylar coating comes right off. After that, it's over.
> >
> > --
> > --
> > Pete Rittwage
> > Disk Preservation Project
> > http://diskpreservation.com
> >
> >
>