Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?

The floppy interface for 5.25 is largely the same as 3.5. The data rates are the same. The only functional difference is fewer sectors per track because of the faster motor speed. That's all accounted for with a FDC interface controlled by a BIOS that knows what each drive is. A USB FDC bridge is stuck on its firmware and has no way to adapt to alternate track layouts it isn't designed to handle.

There's several listings on eBay. The listings for laptops are in a range I'd consider...

The tricky bit is usually there's a proprietary connector for the specific laptop, but I recall taking a laptop cd drive for another project and it was basically a drive with standard 44 pin mobile ide connector plus a little board to go to the proprietary connector wrapped in a line specific case. I'd guess the ls-120 drives are the same deal.

Back in the day when I had an ls-120 drive, it was much superior to a regular floppy drive for reading floppy disks. So I'd definitely try to get that going as a first step.

GreaseWeazle[0] is where it's at now. KryoFlux was all we had before, but GW has overtaken it, and is open source proper.

0. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

3.5" Floppies are either DD or HD. (there's more but let's keep it simple and practical)

A DD drive reads and writes DD floppies better than an HD one, but does not read/write HD floppies at all.

There's a hole in the floppy for write protection (hole covered = write enabled), and there's another hole on the opposite side to signal the floppy is HD. If it's missing, it is DD.

To recover a floppy, a USB drive is about the worst option, as they only expose a decoded floppy, and not the raw data, besides other annoyances.

You'll want a period correct HD FDD, or DD if your floppy is DD and your HD drive is having trouble with it, alongside GreaseWeazle[0].

As for that old 486, you'll want to open the case ASAP and remove the motherboard's CMOS battery, before it destroys the whole thing.

Capacitors aren't anywhere near a concern; most likely they're still fine, and will typically not destroy anything.

0. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

> You'd have been lucky to be able to recover those in 2001.

2001 might be a stretch but indeed they do degrade badly. During Covid I was locked down, by a stroke of bad luck, alone, 2000 kilometers away from my wife and young daughter... In the house were I grew up. My old Commodore 128 was still in the attic and I dug it out, cleaned it, cleaned (and greased) the disk drive and tried to read my 5"1/4 floppy disks.

I'd say I got about 50% success: one disk out of two was already unreadable.

One could see it as "50% success rate after 35+ years is quite good" but I fear that if I were to try now, many more would fail.

I took the opportunity to make a copy of the game Commando (which has an incredible chiptune by Rob Hubbard) on two NOS (new old stock) 5"1/4 floppies. For thankfully I had a copy a Fast Hack'em that'd still boot.

Having real time capsule stuff, re-using data from old floppies that haven't been archived since decades, is becoming near impossible.

In my experience CDs and DVDs I burned myself have a lifespan even shorter than floppies. Most of the CDs I burned in the late 90s/early 2000s are already unreadable.