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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

10 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-...

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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

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.

Almost any two floppy drives you can get a hold of will be mechanically different in sometimes significant ways.

I've got one business tower from over 20 years ago still having the floppy drive connected directly to the motherboard the traditional way.

Plus 3 USB models from HP, Sony, and Teac and they don't all behave the same.

Last month for another floppy article I mentioned that one pack of old floppy disks are offgassing(!), the way they continue to inflate the ziplock bag they are in. Replaced the bag with an new Ikea "ISTAD" ziplock and it's almost fully inflated again by now.

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.

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.

https://hxc2001.com/floppy_drive_emulator/

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