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Refurbishing new in box floppy disks?

retrobits

Experienced Member
Joined
May 22, 2007
Messages
169
Location
Portland, Oregon, USA
Hi there,

Many of us in the vintage computer community have lamented the imminent death of existing floppy media. There are still a few ways to get new in box floppy disks; however, the condition of the disks after a two-decade shelf life is questionable.

I'm wondering - could a way be found to "refurbish" the existing floppy disks? Does some way already exist? It would be great to take the available NIB media and give it a new lease on life.

Things involving heat would probably be bad for the magnetics - but then again, I'm neither a magnetism expert, nor a chemist.

Thoughts? I'd love to keep the old floppy drives running for another decade or two, and the only critical impediment is the doom of existing media.

- Earl
 
New or old, once floppy disks deteriorate to the point where they foul the drive's heads there is nothing to do with them but discard them. Some disks get old and continue to work normally, without causing any problem to the heads. Some get old and become unusable and some NIB disks age in the box to the point of not being usable, either. It's just the way it is. Once the oxide coating breaks down and begins to foul drive heads the disks can't be saved or used again.
 
Many of us in the vintage computer community have lamented the imminent death of existing floppy media. There are still a few ways to get new in box floppy disks; however, the condition of the disks after a two-decade shelf life is questionable.

Questionable in what way? Have you found bad ones?

I sure haven't. In fact, I also have hundreds of disks that have seen some serious abuse, and still work like they did 30 years ago.

The only disks I've ever had go bad were cheapies that went bad soon after they were new, as in, within a year of manufacture.
 
Obviously, you've never run into Wabash floppies. Or the ones that carry the "Precision" name. Or Wright-Line floppies. Storage accounts for a lot also--I've run into bad batches of 3M and Nashua floppies that have been stored in humid, warm conditions.

Like Stone says--if they are bad out of the box, toss them.
 
Nope, I haven't, that I know of. Most of mine are Nashua, 3M, BASF, and Sony. Most are ones I've had since they were new, but some are recent NOS eBay purchases.

Though, literally hundreds that I have are ones that I acquired long ago, "used", and I have no idea who made them. Those spent about 10 years during my ownership stored outside year round, as well as in warm, humid conditions. They are still working.

Like Stone says--if they are bad out of the box, toss them.

Yes. There are plenty of good ones out there.

I have thought of one other thing that affects disk life: What drive(s) they've been used in. I have had disks fail that way.
 
Questionable in what way? Have you found bad ones?

They might not be bad out of the box, but the question is how much life will they have, given they were packaged 20 to 30 years ago. In that amount of time, there is no telling what storage conditions they've seen. I agree some are more robust than others. I have some Xerox-branded 5.25 DS/DD disks (they're likely OEM from a quality mfg) that I've reused, and they are in very good shape. But in 5-10 years, will they still be?

What I'm looking for is some way to "treat" the disks to give them extra life. It's true that when their oxide starts to come off, it's game over, and it's bad for the disk heads as well. I'm wondering, is there any way to stave off that oxide rot for a while longer, assuming that the disk you get hasn't already succumbed?

If that way exists, then now is the time, while quality NIB disks remain available. If we wait, all the disks will be rotten and there will be no turning back.

- Earl
 
Short term, try baking them at 130-140F for a day or so. I do that for data recovery, but I have a special PID-controlled "Hot Box" to do that job. If you have lab incubator oven, that might do. But that tends to buy you only a day or two at most. You can try lubing the surface with a drop of Cyclomethicone--sometimes that helps with squealing (but not shedding) disks. Again, this is useful for recovering data, but with NOS disks, I'd really just toss them.

(KC9UDX, I have literally thousands, some going back to the early 1970s). Most are from customers.
 
Is there anything besides demand preventing the manufacture of new disks?

An oxide covered piece of plastic doesn't seem that hard to make compared to much "modern" tech.
 
Is there anything besides demand preventing the manufacture of new disks?

An oxide covered piece of plastic doesn't seem that hard to make compared to much "modern" tech.

I think what's linked into the decline is the obsolescence of 8mm and VHS tapes, as well as audo cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes. All start out as basically the same thing. Could be that the only major market left might be SLT/DLT/DDS4 tapes--and I don't know if those are still being made.
 
Oddly I seem to have less issues with 5.25" than 3.5". Im forever getting disk errors on my old Amiga sofware, the NonDos disk software seems to fair better, but anything that boots via Workbench seems to be a ticking time bomb for disk failure hence generaly sticking to WHDLoad whare I can now.

The C64 and Vic never seem to skip a beat though, I've generaly stuck to decent brands, 3M and BASF and tend two write files from WIN4CBM to the 1541 through an XM1541 rather than drive to drive which may account for less chance of errors but the disks themselves have not visualy degraded at all.

Seems strange though that the rigid 3.5"s are more susceptible to failure than the big floppy 5.25"s :confused:
 
Oddly I seem to have less issues with 5.25" than 3.5". Im forever getting disk errors on my old Amiga sofware, the NonDos disk software seems to fair better, but anything that boots via Workbench seems to be a ticking time bomb for disk failure hence generaly sticking to WHDLoad whare I can now.

The C64 and Vic never seem to skip a beat though, I've generaly stuck to decent brands, 3M and BASF and tend two write files from WIN4CBM to the 1541 through an XM1541 rather than drive to drive which may account for less chance of errors but the disks themselves have not visualy degraded at all.

Seems strange though that the rigid 3.5"s are more susceptible to failure than the big floppy 5.25"s :confused:
I've had the exact opposite results. I have an overwhelming abundance of 5¼" bad disks as compared with 3½" disks. The ratio is maybe 50:1 or even 100:1.

As far as visually degraded... I have seen no relationship between appearance and functionality. Yes, once a disk has failed and fouled the drive's heads there might be some visual evidence in the form of rings on the disk but I don't see anything beforehand on any disks.

I don't know what you mean by rigid 3.5" disks. All the ones I use have the same or similar floppy material inside as the 5.25" variety. The case or sheath has nothing to do with the actual floppy disk inside. :)
 
Years ago i got hold of a job lot of NOS 5.25" 360K and 1.2Mb Floppy's in sealed packs, I don't remember ever having a duff one and the one's i have used are still good today, I can't say the same for the packs of 3.5" floppy's i got, lots of duff ones.
 
Years ago i got hold of a job lot of NOS 5.25" 360K and 1.2Mb Floppy's in sealed packs, I don't remember ever having a duff one and the one's i have used are still good today, I can't say the same for the packs of 3.5" floppy's i got, lots of duff ones.
There's a difference between disks that fail to format and disks that fail to format and also foul the heads rendering the drive unusable until the heads have been cleaned. Let's not mix apples and oranges in the same basket. I've got lots of unusable 3½" floppies but I rarely, if ever need to use my 3½" head cleaning disk as they just don't seem to deteriorate like the 5¼" disks do.
 
Yes i do know that, Maybe i've just been lucky with my 5.25" disks. NOS and many old / used.
 
Now, if you want to exclude the disks that foul the drive's heads because of the deterioration of the oxide on the surface I will say that the 5¼" and 3½" disks that I have that failed to format without being a royal PITA and also fouling the drive's heads as well turns out to be relatively equal. I have thousands of disks. I used to have tens of thousands. So I've seen quite a few floppy disk format failures as well as had many fouled drive heads. And, since these floppies aren't getting any younger I continue to encounter quite a few disk problem of both types. :)
 
Radio Shack-brand 8" floppies were of varying quality. Some were quite awful. Someone once commented that the really bad ones had been stored in an un-air-conditioned warehouse in Fort Worth and were often bad coming right out of the box. Judging from the jacket welding patterns, it seems as if Tandy bought their floppies from several sources. I've worked with perhaps only 400-500 of the things, so things might not be as dismal as my experience would seem to indicate.

At one point, I think that Heath/Zenith used 5.25" hard-sectored floppies from Wabash as distribution media. Really awful, awful, sticky-shed stuff.

I've purchased a lot of different brands over the years and budget-brand floppies have been a disaster. I don't think I have a single Elephant-brand or Brown-brand floppy left in my collection--they've all failed. The 5.25" Brown floppies I recall has having somewhat thicker jackets, making them difficult to insert into the openings of some drives.
 
Most of the disks that I have (and sell via my SIG, below) are factory reformatted/over-labeled disks that were bulk returns of unsold/unused software from major software manufactures, e.g., Lotus, Microsoft, and some others. The factory then sold them as blanks. I bought these by the thousands in the early 1990s and still have some left. Over the last 20+ years very few have failed for either reason. A good disk is a good disk.
 
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All my old 5 1/4" floppies are perfectly readable, except two that were given to me and appear to have been degaussed.
None of my old 1.44MB 3.5" floppies are without read errors. Tried lots of drives too. All are bad. Even relatively new ones (this side of the year 2000). Same conditions, sometimes same brand (e.g.3M).

-Tor
 
The original point of the thread though is that even a good disk will not last forever. I'm honestly surprised many disks have lasted this long as it is. In general products, plastics become brittle and break after a number of years, metals slowly react with air, glues chemically break down, etc. It may be 10, 20, 50, or 100 more years before they reach a point that they are unusable, but they won't last forever.

The best anyone can do right now, if nobody makes new ones, is search for disks that are known to have been stored well in cool dry places and are of a good quality. Then keep them well stored.
 
Examine each disk before use and toss the ones that are showing signs of disintegrating. Save the drives from getting dirty and damaged in the cleaning process. I am planning on buying a whole bunch and examining each disk before storing the survivors. Will kill any resale value in the process.

I wish I knew who made Inmac branded floppy disks 20 years ago. I had 100% failure when I went to read a whole set; double density or high density in 3.5" or 5.25" made no difference. At least, they didn't foul the drive but I still want to avoid them.

Extremely cheap bulk disks were produced by companies buying low-grade or even discards to fill out the lots. The small software publisher I worked for used bulk diskettes and had more than a 50% failure rate with disks right out of the box. Probably had programmers devote more time testing each disk before shipping than was spent developing the applications sold. Producing financial software at inflated prices ran rather contradictory to the extreme penny pinching on disks.
 
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