Do those floppies actually still work, anybody who has them from the 80’s or early 90’s? I have a whole lot of old Apple-II floppies in both sizes, from my childhood. I’ll keep them even if they don’t work, for the sentimental value. I asked about it here and was told it was unlikely they could still be read:
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[/ul] Any hope of reading old floppies? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
I had to use a floppy less than a year ago when I had to install XP onto a SATA drive. AFAIK, if you want to install to a SATA, you still need a floppy with the SATA drivers on it (or if you want to install onto a RAID array.)
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I see no reason to get rid of mine, and they came in very handy recently when my computer crashed.
No, sir: Them compact discee thingamajigs o’yers are OK, but my 3.5" friends and I have many happy years ahead of us.
No, but I’ve often felt the urge to toss my salad.
I keep a few bootup disks around for occasions when I have to work on someone’s system that can’t boot from CD or USB. My current system however doesn’t even have a floppy drive in it - which is causing a bit of consternation at the moment because I want to update my BIOS and for whatever reason I have been unable to get the flashing program to work under MS-DOS 6.22 booted from a USB thumb drive. No idea what the problem is but I highly suspect that if I could boot from a proper floppy I wouldn’t have this problem. sigh
Plus, flash drives are a pain in the ass to make bootable. (Likewise CDs)
So, no. No floppies hitting the bin here.
How dare you! You rude young man.
Aaaaaaaaanyway, I haven’t even seen a floppy disk in at least three years. I think they’ve now fallen into myth.
No. Not yet, anyway.
I’ve got about fifty or a hundred of them flating around, and I know for a fact that whilst most are full of abject crap such as my ex-brother-in-law’s back-up for accessing his university dial-up account in 1997, there is also sentimental stuff on their like transcripts of old chats with an old online flame, and a lot of photos I’d not want to lose. So, one day when I’ve got a morning free, I’ll just load them all onto my hard drive, burn a back-up CD or two, and then junk most of them - or format them and give them to a school or something (if anybody wants them).
I will keep a half dozen or so though, because my machine has a floppy drive, and it’s got a year or two left in it, the computers at work mostly have floppy drives, and I have occasional use for a floppy. In fact, I’ll be using a floppy disk tomorrow for the first time in about six months.
I’ checked the Apple II games out on the original floppies half a year ago and they all worked. It comes down to how you store them. These are normaly about 50F and not too damp. The thing I miss in games now adays are the extas games had. Infocom was full of extras, and they weren’t the only ones. My Apple II had a 1 Meg upgrade with clock, and it still is correct. It has a $150 optical mouse too. Weren’t those Apple prices great. Three times the IBM.
Guys, you do know that the magnetic fields on floppies decay, don’t you? We had this at work last week and you can expect data on floppies to be readable for only about 5 years unless stored really carefully.
I know not to trust floppies for a long storage. Still they do last way beyond five years. All those really old games loaded and played, and range 15 to 20 years old.
I don’t use many floppies anymore, but when I built this machine I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the floppy drive out. I didn’t want it to LOOK like I was a floppy-using troglodyte, so the drive is in an anti-static bag (just to keep the dust out I guess, and I had plenty of them laying around at the time) laying in the bottom of the case. I’ve used it about 2 times in 2 years, have to pop the side of the case out and use it, then put it back in the vault. I have it if I need it, by gum.
I threw out memory and old cdrom drives recently. Maybe I should have attached some to a table and powered them. Instruct everybody at the meetings that I’ve intalled deluxe executive mug holders.
Yes, but as you noted, you stored them well.
More true of HD disks than DD, I expect. Nearly all my disks date back to the very early nineties, and some to the mid-80s. I’ve lost very few of them (especially just from sitting in the box; lost some due to media errors during the phase in which I actually used floppy disks all the time)
I was just thinking about the box of floppies I have that I haven’t tossed, but they have “stuff” on them. You know, “stuff”. I was thinking I’d bring one to work with me every day, and transfer it on to the work computer, then zip and email myself the “stuff”.
However, I am afraid some of the “stuff” might be pornographic, so I haven’t done it yet. Still, somewhere, there’s a Word document I did years ago with my family’s and my medical history I’d like to retrieve, as both my parents are dead now.
Let’ see:
12" - Gone
8" - Gone
5 1/4" SS/DD - Gone
5 1/4" DD/DD - Gone
3 1/2" - Lots of them left.
My startup disk saved me grief not that long ago when I turned on my computer and got zip. And I don’t mean .zip. I was able to do a restore with no problem and get running again.
Seems - at least in XP - that you can’t initialize system recovery w/o a floppy. I’m not exactly sure why they can’t make those sorts of utilities work from CDs but apparently they still don’t.
You can do it from the install cd if it’s a full install version and not an upgrade. I don’t know why they don’t make the upgrades able to do this, even if they require the original OS cd you upgraded from. The XP start up floppies don’t recognise the NTFS file system, which is what they use as a default format for the hard drive under XP. Boot from an XP floppy and you can access the hard drive files, unless it’s using the FAT or FAT32 format.
About 6 years ago NASA was buying old floppy drives for the space shuttles, because they were wearing out, and the equipment wasn’t very fexable on the upgrade end. I think it was the 12 inch floppy drives they nedded. It’s so sad that the equipment is like this.
I’m a packrat who’s trying to reform, so I don’t have any floppies at home. I have a few at work that I save because a guy in the Accounting Dept. looks for information on them every couple of years. He hasn’t complained about the quality and I just keep them in the back of a drawer. I guess I should just give them to him. I did bring one home to make a Starship Enterprise, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
no 
:mad: