My guess is the disks or drive are bad. I have a similar modern Chinese USB 3.5” floppy drive and a box of disks from the 80’s and most of them seem to work fine in that combination.
Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#22If you're patient, you can find a PC with a floppy drive at a thrift store/goodwill for $10-$15. In my area, I see them several times a year. I have a handful of USB floppy drives, one IBM, one generic drive from the Bondi blue iMac era, and both have worked about the same.
I've had a few discs fail with sector errors that have done nothing but sit in storage for 30 years. In that case, it was fortunate enough to contain a hidden duplicate of the file for the installer to copy.
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#23Maybe, maybe not. Floppies were always on the verge of dying all the time, even in the 80s and 90s. It's why anyone who cared about their data always had at least one backup copy of any important disk or data. (Most software explicitly told you to make a copy for regular use and keep the original safely stored away.)
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#2410 years ago I heard “you’d better read all the floppy disks you’ve got now because you won’t be able to do it later.” You might do better with better hardware, you might not. This thing can get at the raw data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KryoFlux which might let you get most of the bits from a bad block. See https://goughlui.com/2013/04/21/project-kryoflux-part-1-the-...
I can also recommend the KryoFlux. I had some floppy diskettes from a /very/ obscure computer, a Devtronix Model 264 pipe organ computer that recorded artists live, that also used the 3 1/2" form factor. It was able to completely recover all the data from them, and combined with the HxC 2001 Floppy Emulator, get everything onto a modern SD card format.
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#25My goal is to get more of this good DOS and early Windows educational software working for my children.
FYI, you can play in the browser on Internet archive: /msdos_Super_Solvers_Spellbound_1993
That meets your stated goal.
A more fun solution might be a Mister. If you're unfamiliar, it's like a hardware emulator. I've been playing gizmos and gadgets on it. If you really want the feeling of swapping disks, I have my Mister installed in a Macintosh iisi case asking with an nfc reader. I put nfc tags on old blank floppies so that when I insert the disk into the case, the nfc reader reads it and software (zaparoo) loads the game based on the tag...
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#26The diskettes are going to demagnetize over 35 years, I don't think a 90s disk drive is going to make a difference.
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#27[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#28Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48827092 - July 2026 (71 comments)
https://hackaday.com/2026/07/07/its-now-imperative-that-you-...
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#29> If I take the time to bring back to life a more period correct system with an actual IDE floppy drive would it read the disks more accurately?
It's worth noting that floppy drives (with rare exceptions like the LS-120) do not usually have IDE interfaces. In the PC space, floppy drives instead use, well, floppy interfaces. They're completely unrelated to everything that is IDE. (More specifically, they use floppy interfaces that are based around what the Shugart Associates used in the 1970s with their SA400 floppy disk drive -- but ~nobody says it like that.)
> One option for hardware is my parent's Leading Edge WinPro 486. The case looks to be in good shape but I have not opened the case to see the condition of the capacitors yet.
Cool! Way back then, we tended not to have so many problems with electrolytic capacitors. Boards didn't tend to use so many of them and the capacitor plague was not yet a thing.
It's possible that my risk profile is misaligned, but: I'd start by just turning it on and seeing if it works.
Feed it some floppy disks. See if they read.
If it shows positive signs of life, then: You can try your copy of Spellbound.
If that works, then: You can use the old machine to transfer the software to a newer machine. Methods vary (and that's a few steps out), but they usually involve the serial port on the old machine and a USB to serial adapter for the new machine. Sometimes, with a null modem adapter. (It's kind of a whole thing...and it kind of was way back then, too.)
Re: Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?
#3010 years ago I heard “you’d better read all the floppy disks you’ve got now because you won’t be able to do it later.” You might do better with better hardware, you might not. This thing can get at the raw data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KryoFlux which might let you get most of the bits from a bad block. See https://goughlui.com/2013/04/21/project-kryoflux-part-1-the-...
Neat! Thank you for the info on that one. Bookmarked! Before I spend well over $100 importing that device, I previously was thinking of brining up a 2001 era motherboard with a USB stack and can natively host the drives, but the 486 that has sat unused may be a solid option. I presumably can find a way to transfer data to a modern system over serial cable or something.
It may be easier, instead of a serial cable, use a IDE hard disk drive.
You can still purchase IDE USB caddies for your modern system to write to.