My experience with 1.44 floppy disks is that they break down or lose functionality in a short use time.
Any suggestions on how to get longer lastinging 1.44 floppy disks?
Or how to rehab defective ones?
I am one stubborn guy for rehabing things.
Yesterday I fixed a car radiator cooling fan, by opening up the ‘can’ housing of the DC motor to change its carbon brushes, and hammering it back to close-seal it again – feeling proud, and telling my wife “That’s happiness!”
My CD drive is six years old.
At the beginning it could read all my CDs of six years old vintage, meaning its then contemporaries.
I still have all those CDs.
Now, it can’t read most of them.
It seems to have gotten blind to a good extent.
How did that develop, I mean an extensive partial blindness?
Floppies? Forget 'em. They’re technology well past it’s prime. Some utilities like Norton Disk Doctor might be able to recover some data from them if you insist on trying.
As far as the CD-ROM drive, you can go to your favorite computer shop and pick up a CD-ROM lens cleaner, basically a CD with a fine brush that removes dust from the laser lens. Also check your CD-ROMS. Fingerprints and smudges can be cleaned of with ordinary window cleaner and a lint-free cloth (available in photo equipment shops). Small scratches can be reduced or eliminated by any of sever excellent products for this purpose.
I just through out about 200 brand new floppies. They are about 3 years old. I tried to use some when I got my new computer but neither my old or new system could use them. Both computers insisted the floppies were not formatted even though they are preformatted. I have a CD-RW disc I use to transfer info between the two computer now. I doubt I will ever use the floppy drive in my computer again.
I carry my mail and a text editor on a floppy so I can answer it
when I get time. I carry the floppy in a small plastic case that
was made to hold 2 floppies. A floppy will last me about 9 months
of daily, though light use. After that length of time bad spots
may start to develop. Norton Disk Doctor can usually extend the
life of the diskette but it seems that when bad spots start to
develop others will quickly follow.
Some brands of floppies just don’t seem to last as long as other
brands.
You don’t rehabilitate defective floppies any more than you rehabilitate a carton of souring milk. The damn things were disposable media even back in 1986, when they had a purpose in life. (An industrial-strength file recovery and scavenging tool was worth its kilobytes in troy-ounce equivalents though).
If you really want reliable diskettes for actual use in this day and age, and you really and truly want floppy disks rather than Zip cartridges or cigarette-lighter-sized portable USB or Fireware drives, don’t use 1.4’s. Use “DD” disks instead. They only hold half as much but the stronger signal and coarser magnetic recording patterns on disk means they are less fragile. And these day, doubling your storage from ~ 3/4 MB to a bit less than a meg and a half is like doubling your pocket change from a dime to 15¢.
