[Coco] Floppies and floppy drives

[Frank Pittel]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 11:24:44PM -0500, Steve Ostrom wrote:
> 
> 
> -----Original Message----- From: Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:17 AM
> To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Floppies and floppy drives
> 
> At 12:08 PM 4/24/2013, you wrote:
> >On 04/21/2013 06:11 PM, Aldo Lagana wrote:
> >>So I wonder is it the media itself that is gumming the drive?
> >>Or is it filth and 30 years of time?
> >
> >I recently dug out some old floppies for the purpose of backing
> >them up to Drivewire image files.  One of them had sectors that
> >wouldn't read.
> 
> Many forms of magnetic media from the 1980s are susceptible to
> gumminess. If you can confirm they are gummy, the media can indeed be
> recovered.
> ...
> Recover the data immediately. The gumminess will return within about
> 2 weeks.
> 
> Dennis
> 
> 
> I've done a lot of archiving on my Coco 3 disk system.  The main
> problem I've seen is not gumminess of the disks, but a type of
> oxidized scale that makes the disks sound like sandpaper in the
> drive.  This sound happens often when I first clamp the disk in the
> drive as the drive turns for about 1 second.  These scales are
> visible if you examine the disk surface in good light.  I have found
> nothing that helps these disks, and they foul the drive heads
> immediately, requiring a good cleaning of the drive heads.  I wish
> there was some way to "wash" these disks with a solvent that removed
> the oxidation, but would not harm the original surface.  Maybe I'll
> try a few experiments this summer to see if some diluted antioxidant
> mist might work, at lease temporarily.

The problem I've had with very old floppies has to do with thin foam that
a lot of disks were made with. Over the years that foam dissolves into a
kind of glop which not only ruins the disk when trying to access the disk
but also gets on the head in the drive which then ruins all disks put into
the drive later. I've got a bottle of cleaner for tape heads that's able to
clean the heads on the drive.

On a 5.25" floppy it's easy to check to see if there's foam in the disk and if so
if the foam has disolved. If it has I toss the disk. Cleaning the heads on a floppy
drive is a pain and can't do good things to the head alignment.

The Other Frank