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Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

Within the past few days, someone commented with a link to "Floppy Disks: It's Too Late" (2011) from Jason Scott's blog.

Here's an excerpt:

   It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or
   made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care.
   You didn’t do anything and it’s too late now. ...

   If you still have boxes of floppies sitting in your
   attic or basement or grandparents’ place or wherever
   else, I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-
   dependable storehouse are over. It’s been too long, too
   much, and you’ve asked too much of what the floppies
   were ever designed to do. 

   http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191

That's for 5 1/4" disks.

The situation sounds more hopeful for 3 1/2" disks - but if you still have some, now is the time to get that data off.

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I have a pretty large collection of Commodore floppies and possibly even cassettes as well as floppies with early PC stuff. The only method I know of to get data off the Commodore stuff is with an expensive analog reader only made by one or two niche places. Are there any other options?

edit: I guess to answer my own question, I just found out about ZoomFloppy. This thing seems pretty cheap and works specifically for Commodore disks. The other devices I was looking at were for any analog floppy interface... http://www.go4retro.com/products/zoomfloppy/

If you do manage to save the data, consider letting archive.org / Jason Scott know.

Last year I used a Kyroflux [1] USB floppy controller and an old Teac floppy drive to successfully recover data from a collection of 5.25" floppies (DOS, Apple II, and BBC Micro). The disks dated from the mid 1980s. I'd previously tried an old desktop PC with a on-board floppy controller and the DOS disks were completely unreadable, but the Kryoflux managed to extract the files. I dind't have access to an Apple II or BBC Micro, but I expect that those disks were similarly unreadable.

End result was I got to read the source for some of the first programs and electronic documents that I wrote, which to me was worth the time and effort.

So its not necessarily quite true that "its over". But increasingly expensive and time-consuming measures are likely to be required.

(If anyone wants to buy an almost new Kryoflux then my email address is in my profile. I'm in the UK.)

[1] http://www.kryoflux.com/

Can it be used to read 8" disks?

I haven't tried this myself. However, there are various threads (eg. [1][2]) on the Kryoflux support forum where people have reported success, and others ([3][4]) that are more mixed. The Kryoflux manual [5] also says its works with an 8" Shugart 851 drive, and that there are firmware options to support 8" drive timings.

According to an answer on [3] an 8" drive needs to be "Shugart compliant", and in [4] it is mentioned that an adapter made by DBIT is needed to convert the 34-pin floppy cable to the 50-pin interface apparently used by 8" drives. The Kryoflux I have wasn't supplied with a 50-pin cable, so that would need to be sourced.

So, probably doable with some moderate effort...

[1] http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=159

[2] http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=887

[3] http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=706

[4] http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?t=56

[5] http://www.kryoflux.com/?page=download#docs

I beg to disagree. A year ago, I fished out my collection of 5 1/4" disks and transferred them to a hard drive. Most of them read okay.

On the 3 1/2" front a couple of months ago, I fished out my boxes of 3.5" floppy disks and transferred them to a hard drive, then overwrote them with zeros, effectively doing an exhaustive surface test. Only a small number (single digits) were unreadable, and less than 10% would have had any read errors. Of the 90% that read error free, they all wrote error free.

Going free: 230 x 1.44MB 3 1/2" floppy disks, all recently verified for no bad sectors. Pickup from Sydney, AU. I can also throw in a few 100MB zip disks.

> I can also throw in a few 100MB zip disks.

I still have a clear memory of just what the click of death sounded like.

Definitely doesn't sit with my subjective memory of what using floppies was like...then again by the mid 90s a pirated game would often take 10+ floppies so with a ~10% failure rate you had a pretty good chance of getting a bad one thus rendering the whole batch useless (couldn't play the game if a single arj/zip file was lost due to bad sectors on its diskette).

I also wonder how quick rewriting new content wore them out.

I missed that distinction when I posted the link. I'm sure they had difficulty rescuing Price of Persia.

If you have some time to spare, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8 (or read http://ultimacodex.com/2012/04/saving-prince-of-persias-sour... and the many other sources)

Your comment history led me to the submission. :)

"ANSI Art Collection from Old BBSs" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9401525

Thanks - I'll definitely check out those links.

I fished out my USB 3 1/2" floppy drive... it still works. I've also got a box of old floppies. Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend!

I have a bunch of 5.25" floppies from the late 80s (Apple II software) and lots of 3.5" floppies from the early 90s, and a few weeks ago they all seemed to work perfectly fine.

BTW old 3.5" floppies (early 90s) are much, much more reliable then more recent ones. In fact, the latest floppies I bought (2002-2005 or so) are utter crap, and most of them are unusable, and were almost from the start.

people: http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/warhol-discovery

interface: http://www.kryoflux.com/

software: http://www.softpres.org/kryoflux:ui:stream-plot

tldr: hardware interface samples FDD head at 25MHz, this allows for more relaxed timings and human assisted interpretation of MFM encoding on degraded media

ps: and if you still have trouble recovering with this hardware there is even more hardcore mod that adds Microstepping head motor controller, cant find the link at the moment :/

Better not tell my 8" disks.

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