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

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

#41

Post by ramses0 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #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 in…

LS-120 users unite! Loved that particular piece of tech, still have the drive and a few sealed floppies for it in my "data recovery storage bucket", forgot about that incredibly interesting detail w.r.t. it taking an IDE-chain position rather than riding the floppy-bus.

I went through my "sentimental" 3.5" floppy spelunking era, basically a bunch of `rsync /mnt/floppy ./floppies/xyz-whatever` and pushed that to my remote server backups... ahh, the joys of finding my old CS1301 homework with "SSN: xxx-xx-xxxx" in the README.txt (or header comment)... good times!

I've already bought a USB-Floppy (and other USB-based "old media" bits), but I'll definitely be keeping the LS-120 now as I think IDE is more durable (and IIRC LS-120 drives were more "precise" w.r.t. track recovery/locating since they supported the higher data densities). Doing some searches show there's also "IDE-to-USB-C Adapter Kits(!!!)" which will definitely be going into the bucket too!

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

#42

Post by sgbeal »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #39
sgbeal wrote: post #36

> My first attempt at restoring 1991 Learning Company Spellbound for DOS for my children is dubious. Despite being stored nowhere near magnetic sources, there are read errors on the 3.5 inch floppies and Linux could not mount them. FWIW, it's long been my experience that floppies (like CDs and DVDs) have a half-life and they degrade quickly upon reaching it. You'd have been lucky to be able to recover those in 2001.…

> 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.…

> 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.

Similar here: CDs and DVDs burned from 2000-2006 or so were, without exception, illegible by 2015. It's sickening.

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

#43

Post by vunderba »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #38
vunderba wrote: post #6

Learning Company software has been pretty well archived at this point. To me, the easiest approach would be to hold onto the original box/packaging for sentimental purposes, and just find a copy of it on a site like the Internet Archive. If your goal is to use it on a period-correct system, I’d go with 34/40pin adapters that lets you read flash cards, USB, etc. A lot of my friends have kept their old 486 computers, a…

Upvoted you but... > A lot of my friends have kept their old 486 computers, and everything is period-correct except for the hard drive and floppy drive which have been replaced with a CF-to-IDE for the HDD and Gotek running FlashFloppy firmware for the 3.5". That's quite stretching the definition of "period correct". I mean: how could one have a 486 even less period correct than that? With adapters for more modern RA…

> everything is period-correct EXCEPT for the hard drive and floppy drive

Hence why I couched my assertion with "except". IMHO its the best way to enjoy the original hardware experience without all the inevitable failures of using decades old magnetic storage media.

Side note, I had high hopes for industrial boards (Vortex86) as a means of letting more people experience the original hardware without having to lug around a boat anchor but when I tried one, the experience was fraught with all kinds of annoying issues (SVGA, etc)...

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

#44

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

GJim wrote: post #34
bityard wrote: post #23

Maybe, 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.)

> Floppies were always on the verge of dying all the time, even in the 80s and 90s THIS! Gen-X here..... 3.5" Floppies were notoriously unreliable, even good quality branded discs had a fairly high failure rate. Were were always careful to make multiple backups of anything important stored to floppy. When CD-Rs came along they were a godsend. Yes, a different drive might help OP as sometimes the alignment was slightl…

A lot of that is just damage from continuous use. Floppies used rarely tend to work well. I have 90s backup disks that were flawless reads in recent years. I just bought a 25 year old sewing machine with a floppy in it. Still worked fine. I have a scope with floppy that I use occasionally with a disk for image transfers. It and my USB drive have been reliable for years.

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

#45

Post by MoneyLovesSpeed »

bluGill wrote: post #20
MoneyLovesSpeed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kinda crazy that just switching drives can make an unreadable disk readable makes me wonder how many old floppies got written off as dead when it was really just an alignment mismatch

In the early 80s this was a fairly common thing that was known to happen with floppy disks where some manufacturers drives could not read disks written by other manufacturers even though in theory they were compatible and used the same standard. Usually floppy drive manufacturers test their drives against diswritten by whoever made the computer. So if you had an Atari, then anything written with an Atari drive could…

thats wild, didnt know it was that common kinda funny to call it a standard if ppl still couldnt reliably read each others disks lol

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

#47

Post by ssl-3 »

ramses0 wrote: post #41
ssl-3 wrote: post #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 in…

LS-120 users unite! Loved that particular piece of tech, still have the drive and a few sealed floppies for it in my "data recovery storage bucket", forgot about that incredibly interesting detail w.r.t. it taking an IDE-chain position rather than riding the floppy-bus. I went through my "sentimental" 3.5" floppy spelunking era, basically a bunch of `rsync /mnt/floppy ./floppies/xyz-whatever` and pushed that to my re…

I don't have an LS-120 anymore, but I did have one at the very tail end of the floppy era. I never fed it one of the fancy disks. :-/

It worked, though, and it was really fast with regular floppies. Part of me says that I should have held onto it, but the rest of me is kind of glad that I haven't been moving it from place to place for the past ~20 years.

LPT: You can plug your USB floppy drive into your modern pocket supercomputer. In what may be the funniest bit of anachronistic computing you've seen in a long time, it will show up as removable storage without any effort and you can read and write files with it. :)

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