Unfortunately, the "dirt" you saw on the cotton buds wasn't dirt; it was part of the oxide layer coming off the wafer. This explains why some disks were worse after cleaning. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do in those situations.
@@vetar3372 there is a cursor on what to use. 70% is strong enough without being destructive on the disk surface. I have cleaned more than 800 disk with my method, and it works :)
@@dlfrsilver Well, i am not going to state anything. But i think it is better to be safe than sorry. I also wonder if the local climate will have any different effect on disk degradation and when it comes to cleaning them (this topic is still fairly new to me)
As a recent returnee to DOS/Windows 98 gaming I ran in to my first floppy disk failure this morning. Your video prompted me to take a closer look at my disk 1 of the original Civilization, and there was indeed a smear on the disk. A spot of IPA cleared it up and it's now installed just fine. While it won't solve your disk woes, you at least helped a brother out!
I contacted TDK if they would ever consider making brand new batches of floppies, they were polite but not interested. If we all signed a petition then maybe someone would!
Perhaps something along the lines of a gofundme, kickstarter etc would be needed to place the minimum order quantity for them to be interested,(you're probably looking in the region of 100,000s, if not millions of units, and not to knock your effort(taking the time to contact them shows great enthusiasm and go) but the old molds they used to manufacture them would have to be remade(which are not cheap), might explain the lack of interest from them, slow return on investment/too niche of a market, I'd love to see them reproduce those TDK cassettes, they were always great quality... Sometimes costs like these can be very easily offset, if the whole project/product draws the company a lot of positive publicity and from a large demographic too.. how many people want to bring back physical media gaming, I would say quite a lot 👏
Back in the old days of fixing amiga disks that went though hell aka killed by magnetic fields of TV or Speakers ... you copied sectors to the same disc 5 to 8 times in "X-copy" ... fist you scan the disc to find if it has bad sectors in X-copy : 6 means BAD sector , 8 also means bad but its also means disc was damaged by magnetic fields ... then you simply mark those sectors and recopy them 5 to 8 times to the same disc... by this method you can fix many Amiga games ... when they boot and are good , you do a copy of it and store it ... but a word of warning, some Original Amiga discs had Sector DRM ...so even if you fix the Data , the Non-readable sectors of the DRM could be damaged making the disc fail ... but X-copy was the silver repair\piracy tool for all
I'm so glad I made disk images of all my old games that were on floppy's. When one of the originals gives an error, I succeeded sometimes in just writing the image I had again on the disk. Unfortunately this does not work all the time (if the disk is actually just broken beyond repair). What you can do to have the "original" disk, is pry open the floppy, and replace the disk with one of a floppy dat does work, and reassemble the floppy disk again. It's a bit of a hassle, but you can save the "housing" of the original floppy this way, with a working disk inside. I recommend "practising" this technique first with some floppies you don't actually need.
3.5" disk spindles have two holes in them, the center hole and a rectangular hole set off to the side. I have seen another design out there for the disk holding jig where the spindle turning thingy has 2 pins on it instead of 1, so it engages both of the holes in the spindle. That one would probably grip the spindle better so you wouldn't have the problem where the thing just spins in place. Great idea clamping the thing in a vise. In hindsight it is totally obvious, but for whatever reason that idea never occurred to me.
I've had success cleaning floppies - I realise I was lucky with the batch I had and they were just dirty rather than damaged. Basically, crack open up the case at the bottom edge and drop out the disk itself. With a little neat washing up liquid, go all over both surfaces of the disk, rub it in well and give it time to work. If the disk comes away from the little metal carrier it sits on, don't worry about it for now. Now wash the soap off and make sure you dry the disk really well. Now you can re-attach the metal carrier VERY CAREFULLY with a small smear of superglue. Slide the disk and carrier back inside the case and seal the case with a tiny smear of superglue. Now test it. I've had success with this method but use it as a last resort ;)
Excellent video. I have collection of Atari 1050 drives with 5.25" floppies. These days when I use it I remove the lid to make sure the head is clean and that a disk doesn't leave dirt on the heads after use as this can damage the next disk put in the drive. Also I keep my floppies well stored with moisture capture cartons in the same room. Seems to work! Occasionally get the odd disk that develops a bad sector, and your demonstration is a brilliant way to fix it. Great to see others with the same passion for retro! All the best 🙂
I had WAY better results using warm soapy water (just a bit of dish soap) than I did with IPA. It did a phenomenal job cleaning off mold from some old disks. IPA just sort of smeared the crap around versus actually cleaning it. Said moldy disks had destroyed two of my floppy drives (Macintosh Sony variable speed drives, so it's not like I can just swap them around with generic drives.) Audible screeeach, then a thunk. Neither drive would read floppy disks after many attempts at cleaning the heads with IPA. However, after my success with cleaning the mold off the disks themselves with warm soapy water, I did the same with my floppy drives. Brought both drives back to life. So if you have a disk that wasn't working after a clean with IPA, I'd say give warm soapy water a try. Use the IPA to clean any soap residue that might be left.
Please help me! I have already 3 drives of 5 1/4 that all they do is destroy disk after disk, they leave deep grooves on the disks and after cleaning and cleaning and more cleaning with alcool seems to make them worse and worse ! I dont know what to do ! I dont think its just a problem with moldy, flaky old disks ... it must be the drives themselves :(
I've just tried this on some discs I was imaging with a DiscFerret (same principles apply to Greaseweazle, which works the same way). Discs were showing patterns of errors in blotches on the HxC Floppy Editor "disc" view. I cleaned them with a foam swab and isopropyl and re-read them, and got a good read from most the second time around. Trying other brands of disc drive and cleaning the heads helped too. Sadly I've yet to find a good solution for 3.5in discs where the hub has detached from the magnetic disc 'cookie'.
There is a discussion on EAB at the moment with regards disk cleaning, it may be worth checking out. I got the impression after skim reading that a lower concentration isoprop is what to go for. Have a read, it may help for future endeavours. I have to say, all your gear is remarkably clean and spanky looking. Whatever you're doing to keep it in that condition is excellent. I have recently gotten a few old Amigas to restore properly and certainly that level of cleanliness is my goal for them!
You can try my cleaning kit, you can find the download in the link in the description here: th-cam.com/video/I-MKpgO4nOY/w-d-xo.html. It uses the off center hole to turn the disk donut, and I use a microfiber cloth instead of a cotton bud which can leave dust inside the disk. I've cleaned more than 300 disks successfully with this thing. I don't really print and sell them anymore but you can have it done by a friend or online.
@@CRG: LOL, if cleaning the disks didn't seem like too much hard work to do it on the video, then why would connecting a joystick seem like "too much hard work"?
@@HelloKittyFanMan if I say I was tired after cleaning them would you believe that? Or how about if I just admit to being to lazy to get one out of the drawer?
Good Video . Like you had in the video I have had mixed results with cleaning disks. If you do not have a 3D printer you can use a piece of tape to hold open the floppy's door while cleaning. As a last result I have written a floppy image to a new blank and swapped internals with the original to make a good working 'original'
With my Amiga I only use my disk drive to image disks. These can be created in ADF format for use and to backup the disk. You can also image out to a disk if it fails or the data gets corrupted.
Yes you can do that certainly. However the more you use the original the more likely you are to damage it. Especially now that the hardware used to read these old disks are getting old themselves. Old irreplaceable originals should be copied to a preferred media type and used from there instead.
Hi - Nice Video on a common problem As there are 2 components, there is 2 places to look at first Drive mechanism, most people clean the heads, but you should also do a alignment, there are some software floppy tools available to read a disk and determine its alignment most older drive units have a adjuster on them Note original double density 5.25 x 360k and 3.5 720k driver have a stronger and wider rear write head, then the high density format came out the HD units can read and write to these but the HD systems do have a thinner rear/write head - so generally they can safely read and write , but some of the original Double Density drives may not really understand it -most times it is Ok - this is why for double density you should format them in a older double density drive and you can use them Floppy media - these have 5 common faults 1. Age Dust - Mold on media 2. Age each magnetic particle is now weak or not refreshed it cannot hold a charge or lost the original 3. Physical scratch or flaw on the media 4. Heat 5. next to strong magnet 1. just clean it, you can simple blow the dust of or clean it as you demonstrated 2. This is trial and error, reformat the diskette, if the media particles are weak and faulty they will not hold a format, if you are lucky it will work, partially lucky maybe a few bad sectors and you can live with that as a data disk or files only ( ie nothing that is used for copywrite where it looks at a certain track / sector for information ). If it cant hold a format you should bin it - you can try formating or another disk drive or say apple / amiga but it will at best be borderline 4. Physical scratch - junk it - if it was part of a original box set, i would place a small colour sticker on it advising faulty and get a image and place on generic floppy 4. Heat will damage the coating on the diskette surface, best to bin it as it will be totally unstable 5. if you get the floppy next to a strong magnet eg HIFI speaker then you may have a change of reformatting it to reset the media Any media - Tape - Floppy - Hard Drive - DATA FADE While this is not really how it works, floppy media is like tape media, it has a coating, the coating is either readable or unreadable - a format sets the magnetic polarity to neutral, when you write to a floppy or tape it sets the polarity to +ve or -ve the magnetic equivalent of binary 1 or 0 With hard drives - if you dont use them often - eg backups, i like to use this every 6 months, it does defrag and checkdisk etc, but reads every sector and rewrites it to ensure it is writen on new fresh location with now a reset magnetic field diskfresh www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html I have no link with the company other than grabbing these free tools and using them in 2017 Regards George
Get a greaseweazel USB magnetic flux writer device - then replace the internal magnetic part of your original discs with the internal parts from some good branded blank discs. Then just re-write the discs from disc images.
I've had some success with using compressed air and blowing it through the hole in the hub and around the outside of the hub. Also through the door both sides. I use a compressor with water trap filter and a pressure regulator to drop the pressure. Doesn't always work but worth a try. Great video. Thanks.
Thanks for the video. Nicely done. I’m working on some 5.25 disks at the moment and just as you said the magnetic field stuff is going over my head. Trying to learn a bit more though. Kryoflux makes a card to read disks with weak fields (could make a dad joke here, but will hold off). Keep the vids coming.
Why didn't someone design the knob so that it would have a key that plugs into that other hole in the hub? And why does it have that wedge notch in it?
Sounds like a case of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ - but if your big box games are dying, it’s definitely worth a pop. Aside, out with of something like FluxEngine (which isn’t hard btw) to try and recover the original images have you thought about downloading disk images from online and writing them to different disks, and then transferring the magnetic platters into the original floppy cases? Either way, great video, and very informative. Thanks.
That's probably the next stop for the likes of those steel sky disks, swap out the platters and rewrite the contents. Not that's is really necessary since you can always use a modern alternative but still nice to try and keep the old media going.
Hi Glen... lots of info here but I don't know if any is actually of use to you. Around 6 or so months ago I was really struggling with floppies. It turned out to be a UEFI/motherboard/win7 problem and not the actual drives and floppies themselves, but it looked like it was the floppies at the time. As a result I bought loads of new old stock, and drives, and old pirate disks to use as blanks, and I also have a load of boxed games. I'm a bit funny in that I do not want to use goteks at all. Ideally I want to use real floppy disks and I have various machines that use 3", 3.5" and 5.25". So far I've noticed that boxed games have disks that last way better than the ones in cardboard boxes or in the plastic 80 disk boxes. It may be down to better quality of disk but I suspect it's more to do with how they're stored. I think it's something out of the following - dust, mould, spilt drinks, hot/cold cycles, sweat/grease freezing/thawing, damp that causes the problems. I think a bit of grease on the surface of a disk in 1989 might see it still working in 1990, but by 2020 it could have killed it. I don't know if it's some or all of those conditions, though. Something you didn't mention, or at least I don't think you did. And something nobody else really seems to mention either is the paper disc inside the disk. Inside each disk there are two and they're glued to the plastic housing. They can be removed if you break the disk open a bit. I don't know if it needs to be opened all the way or if you could grab and pull them out with tweezers. The white discs are there to keep the magnetic surface clean but I have a huge suspicion that they can end up killing the disks, and I think that's what killed your Monkey Island disk. I think debris can get lodged on the white disc and rub against the magnetic surface and that's why you might see lines on it. I also think the white discs could end up deforming and end up growing in size - imagine a piece of paper that gets splashed and dries - and that is what the nasty sound is of old disks spinning, it's the swollen white disk rubbing against the magnetic surface. I don't know if a swollen disc will hinder the disk spinning to the point it causes errors? I don't know if a problem disk can have the white paper discs removed and perhaps it might help. As for cleaning the disks with IPA I would suggest it's only done where a problem is found. I have the same frame and knob as you - if only it was really that simple to get a bigger knob - and I've used it successfully on disks. The disks I fixed were bulk new old stock. These were clearly budget disks and had been presumably sealed into a plastic bag in 50s 25+ years ago. Some of them I could see some kind of contaminant on them and with IPA and a cotton bud I was able to clean them, and by repeatedly trying to format them I got them working. The problem with this is that for an ST or Amiga disk we need 100% of it to work, but if it's a PC disk and there's a few bad sectors we can probably still get away with it. I've lots more I want to do with disks - and I have over 1,000 NOS and blanks to play with but it won't be for a long time. I would expect, and this is going out on a limb that eventually I will take a commercial game disk and break it open (they can be resealed with glue) and remove the dead disk and replace it with a working one that I've written in Greaseweazle and by doing that I will have repaired the game disk, and it will be identical to what it once was. I also don't agree with people that say that all disks are going to die and they have a finite lifespan. I don't think that's necessarily true. We don't know what the rate of decay on the disks is, but there's no reason to assume that it's going to happen in our lifetimes, maybe it will, maybe it won't. I hope that in some way helps Glen, sorry it's such a long read.
Thanks for the detailed comment. The white bit inside the disks is like a cotton which as you say is there to keep the disk clean. As far as I know its on this surface that the mold grows which then has potential to damage the disks surface. The damage on the Monkey Island disk could be caused by that but I think it more likely that the disks surface has degraded and probably from environmental factors. The glue that binds the magnetic media to the disk can breakdown causing said media to come away and I think that's what happened here. The disks maybe spend 20 years in a roof space, an environment which here in the UK can be damp, dry, cold or hot throughout the year so it's no surprise there are problems. If I knew then what I know now they wouldn't have been stored like that but it is what it is. As for the lifepsan, I don't think they'll live forever but I also don't see why a good disk can't keep on going for many many years yet. While I don't really use them on the Amiga I do use them regularly on my PCs. It's really the only means of getting initial software onto the older machines.
@@CRG I'm not sure about that, the monkey island disk looks like disks I've got where the visible damage on the surface is a perfect circle, just like what would be formed if a bit of grit was on the disc scratching it. Or at least that's my best guess and I'm not letting go of it :) I suppose it doesn't matter either, by the point we can see the damage it's done and so is the disk. I do wonder if the dirt that came off that cotton bud wasn't dirt but was part of the disk.
Since its beyond repair anyway I'll open that disk up tomorrow and take a look. I suppose it's possible a bit of grit or something got in there but its also known that the iron feroxide surface can come off. As I say I'll take a look tomorrow and maybe stick a picture up on twitter or the community tab here.
That's why I always try to create a disk image of my original software. Fortunately, I was able to do it to most of the disks I bought first hand. But some of the games I bought used was 'no go'. Conquest of Camelot, for instance, the 3.5" disks were all good, but the 5.25, kids 1 to 4 were unreadable, but I've not tried to clean them yet. Also, in the past, I've made the error of putting dirty disks (with mould) in a drive... the movement and contact with the drive head was enough to damage the oxide layer. It is also crucial to clean the disk drive after this type of incidents, to avoid contaminating other floppies.
Great video and congrats on the 2k+ subs mate. That's awesome. Re disk cleaning, sadly I had already tried this exact method on an entire Tenstar Games pack for the Amiga, including Barbarian. Now to be fair, ALL Ten were terrible, none loaded except Mercenary (once) and ALL made horrid scraping noises. The A500 itself was hardly used by it's previous owner. As a result, the drive is squeaky clean and all other disks work 100% fine all the time. So.....I took to cleaning the disks as you did, and NONE worked and then even Mercenary failed. They all continued to make horrid noises and Barbarian disk failed completely to the point the disk surface came away from the center wheel. Why? Well, because this method "can" be too harsh. Apparently the better method is to use a little ISO on a macrofibre. Using the caddy you printed, you hold the disk open and hold the fiber lightly on BOTH sides of the disk while turning the wheel. This applies much less ISO than the botton bud method and is less abrasive to the surface of the disk. Seems like a fine art. NOW....all that aside, I did also clean 2 Amiga Format cover disks with the cotton bud method (STOP OVERRIGHTING OR BINNING THOSE BY THE WAY lol ;) ) and they seemed to fail. I randomly tried them again a few months later. They first failed...and then...they both WORKED! So.....I dunno lol. I think it's a very fine art and depends greatly on the reason for the initial failure. Going forward, I'll be looking to get a Greeseweazle to restore original disk images to new media, and swap out the guts. Also risky but I can't make the disks any worse than they are now lol.
I´m a bit late, but there are my 2 cents in the 3d printer issue. The wall-infill gaps can have several causes: - Improper filament diameter. Unfortunately, some brands don´t give the full 1.75 section so there´s some under extruding. Test with the caliper to average the size and adjust the material in Cura if it´s wrong. - Printing speed, temp, flow, retraction settings can affect the results too. Ideally some testing to catch the ideal settings for every material can give the best result. As the overall quality seems quite decent (on camera, though), I´d suggest going straigt to measure the filament, and if it´s ok just seek the "outline overlap" setting and rise it a bit. You can also rise the flow a bit if other areas lack material too (when you point the gaps the top right area printing lines look a bit empty). Hope it helps. Cheers
I used to open the disk, and then clean CAREFULY prependicular from the center to the outside, and then put the disk inside the plastic case again , and close-it. and it worked for me.
Once you succeed in rescuing a whole set of disks by cleaning them, you ought to try to find any NOS disks of the same density that you can back them up to, as well as backing them up as install images onto a hard disk, optical, flash, or all 3, if it seems like someone hasn't done so already, so that you might not lose that game from all functional existence.
Sometimes I magnet wipe disks that look physically clean but still has errors. This can often refresh/restore them (magnetically) and allow you to rewrite the original image back on to them without errors.
Just blindly cleaning the disks won't give much success. You need to pair it up with something like Greaseweazle (flux level reader/writer) so that you can dump an image of the disk an analyse it for errors. Greaseweazle can also be used to rewrite original images back to the disk, or to a donor disk and then replace the damaged and unrecoverable media.
very interesting that outcome... reminds me of the consistency I had back in those days with my own games/programs especially making it 5 discs in all the way to 8x% only to have it fail the moment you speak. I can still taste the frustration from my own 386/486/P90 😝 lol I think it was moments like the one where it worked till you spoke that are probably responsible for creating superstition in my life 🔮
I've found useful, for old and apparently bad damaged floppies, to let them mildly dry below my A1200 w Blizzard. After a few hours "warming", they turned readable and working again. In my case it was moisture, not dirty. Cheers, M
Something worth considering is to make copies of your important collectable disks onto a preferred media type and only use the copies. You'd be surprised how many HD floppies can fit on to a modern sized media like flash disks or HDDs.
Yep worth doing. I rarely use floppies these days but the point was more to see if I could revive known bad disks. At this point my big box games are display items only, especially on the Amiga since I just use WHDLoad for everything.
As far as I know there is no exact or reliable way to restore original floppies. Not trying to read them today would be the best method of keeping them intact. An unfortunate paradox. That being said just having them in their original boxed is pretty awesome. Nice collection. I certainly wish I had kept all my old big box PC games.
I've heard some say that in later years of disk manufacturing the quality maybe wasn't as good so they don't last. Probably some truth in that but in my experience more of my DD disks have failed than HD.
I remember changing the spring tension of my floppy drive to get some disks to read properly. It's heads had some raised sections on the top where the tension spring sat and had 3 positions. Found I usually had to weaken the tension when I used HD disks for some reason. Maybe they're thicker?
So IPA could cause issues. I know it's good for cleaning the heads of disk and tape drives but those tend to me made up of metallic or similar material. Any plastic-based material can be impacted, esp depending on the strength of it (i.e. 99% is worse than 50%' -- I tested a bunch of products on plastics after I damaged a portable amp's exterior surface and IPA causes a chemical reaction on certain types of material). Here is part of an abstract of a paper about restoring magnetic recording media (fixing "sticky shed"): "A liquid cleaner, such as isopropyl alcohol, is applied to the Backcoating to dissolve it from and clean it off the Mylar Base. Before the liquid cleaner is applied, steps are taken to prevent the cleaner fluid from getting onto the Oxide side of the tape. The chemical cleaning is done as quickly as possible... the Oxide side of the tape is given a dry, non-chemical cleaning to remove the residue of contamination of the Backcoating which was deposited on the Oxide side of the tape as the result of physical contact with the Backcoating from the storage on the reel ..."
The stuff I used is 70%. There certainly didn't appear to be any physical problems from it although as you seen a few of the disks didn't read as well after cleaning. I'll test them again and see if perhaps they have further degraded. Perhaps the solution here is to clean then dry yourself, rather than leave it to dry as I did.
Yep there's no reason you couldn't do it and I may take this approach to fix the likes of Monkey Island. Only thing you need to watch is that the disks are generally glued together so you need to be careful opening them.
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@@CRG I was about to suggest this but made sure to read the comments. Replacing the disc inside seems like a good option to try on permanently damaged disk where a rewrite is not an option or did not work. Have opened disk before but was so long ago. Would be nice with a video of that. I would consider the disk original if the internal disk is replaced and rewritten with a proper image that is original to.
@@CRG I've done this with more than one AmigaDOS based Amiga game (Flashback immediately springs to mind). Found a disk image online, copied the contents to a known good disk, then gently opened the original game & copied disks and swapped the good copy disk media into the original case, then glued the game disk case back together again. Very satisfying to get an otherwise good big boxed game working again. As a general rule I've always stored my original game disks in the original game box, nowadays taking no chances by putting them in sealable plastic bags too. The vast majority of them hav been fine. Disks that have been stored in less than perfect conditions inside old plastic floppy storage boxes (more open to the atmosphere) are the ones that have suffered with muck/mould. Thrown hundreds away as they were dirtying my floppy drives.
I just cleaned 4 of my Amiga disk drives the other day, 2 of them were not reading anything but now they all are. Never tried cleaning any disks yet but I have my Amiga big box games mainly as shelf fillers anyway and play them from hard disk when I want to.
No I didn't bother doing that as in the first place I wanted to see if it was possible to recover the disks by simply cleaning. I may do this with the steel sky disks and see if I can then rewrite the original contents back.
Regarding the noisy disk, I'd be worried about that as noise means vibration from friction, and friction on that media is not good... Probably a larger than normal particle is caught in the felt lining of the disk internals and is rubbing on the surface of the disk. I would be cautious of the IPA as I use that as a solvent in some cases.. I guess it could make matters worse for the media, though it seemed ok. Maybe some IPA was still on the disc, absorbed by the same felt lining of the disc, making it grab it more and slow it down? I would only do this to problematic discs though, if it works, don't clean it maybe? Finally, for magnetic fading, maybe invest in a Kyroflux and rewrite a flux file from someone else's working copy back to the disk? Needed for some originals due to their complex copy protection.
I'd agree if it isn't broke don't try to fix it so if your disks are working then just leave well enough alone. I'm not sure the IPA will damage the disk surface, the stuff I used is 70% but point taken than stronger stuff may eat into it. While it seems only a few minutes passed in the video it was probably more an hour between cleaning and when I started to test so I would expect that any IPA would have dried in that time. As for the damage I'm going to pull open that Monkey Island disk alter to inspect the felt. Just want to see if there is any dirt in there that might have caused the damage.
My understanding is that it works for dirty disks (dirty with dust and other particles), but not for scratched disks. As for "de-magnetized" (if that's a word in english? :)) I think I remember that some disk utilities claimed to "revive" somewhat those kind of disks... My memeory may be failing, here though :( As usual, very cool vid :)
SpinRrite was able to analyze magnetic flux and work out if it was a 1 or a 0 by doing multiple reads an even moving the heads back and forth to different tracks to get a better "look" and rewrite the surface, but that was mainly for HDDs I believe that it supported. IO remember using it with some success on floppy disks though..
@@DarkAlaranth spinrite can be very good to revive disks BUT it maybe end up permanently destroying the data... I have a few ARJ files on disks that spinrite managed to "correct" but now the ARJ gives crc errors and never was able to recover the data. I would try to get the data manually first even if it kept failing and failing "data errors" and even try the disks one a few different drives. Sometimes a different drive will read sectors that another couldn'.t. And only use spinrite AFTER to refresh the surface and re-record the data back into the disk.
I think the combination of ageing drives and heads combined with ageing floppy disk material means they should be immediately converted to ADF files and then write the data back to new disks if you want to still use floppies? I think with the advent of Gotek drives and some new improved Gotek like drives, the era of floppies is long over, they are too slow and too prone to failure. Practically every Amiga I have bought and refurbished has had faulty drives and yes you can fix them, but it's probably not worth the hassle. To me it's a bit like vinyl disks, when I got a new album I would immediately record it to the best quality tapes I could afford and never use the disk again until my tape wore out and then I would buy a new one and record from the album again. So over many years the disk would only be read a few times keeping the wear caused by the record player needle to a minimum. I think floppies are now the same, the act of reading the disks causes wear so you want to keep it to a minimum so I would record to ADF and use the ADFs instead of wearing the disk any more than you have to. At least if you have the box and the disk and the manuals you can prove that you have the right to own the ADF files. Also keeping the boxes and manuals is a good collector thing as they look good on your shelves even if the disk no longer works.
I was hoping that cleaning would fix the disks, because I have a ton of disks that doesn't get read or have errors. I have some old porn, errr important files that I would like to retrieve. :P
hah I thought you will clean them up and they'll magically work, I share your disappointment. I have a few games with the same fate, I'll still give them a clean but I don't have high hopes, especially after watching your video. Thanks for trying!
@@BumdanglerFartbiscuitin some parts of the UK, 3.5"s were called “stiffy disks” especially among teens of the late 80s early 90s. It didn’t catch-on long-term though, especially because they were always called microfloppy in the US. I kinda wonder if OP was talking about that, albeit in a really annoying way!
Unfortunately, the "dirt" you saw on the cotton buds wasn't dirt; it was part of the oxide layer coming off the wafer. This explains why some disks were worse after cleaning. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do in those situations.
This happens when using 90% alcohol. Only 70 % alcohol must be used.
@@dlfrsilver He used 70% alcohol
@@dlfrsilver I think it is 50% that is recommended. Even then i would definitely be on the safe side and use as little as 25%, if at all
@@vetar3372 there is a cursor on what to use. 70% is strong enough without being destructive on the disk surface. I have cleaned more than 800 disk with my method, and it works :)
@@dlfrsilver Well, i am not going to state anything. But i think it is better to be safe than sorry. I also wonder if the local climate will have any different effect on disk degradation and when it comes to cleaning them (this topic is still fairly new to me)
As a recent returnee to DOS/Windows 98 gaming I ran in to my first floppy disk failure this morning. Your video prompted me to take a closer look at my disk 1 of the original Civilization, and there was indeed a smear on the disk. A spot of IPA cleared it up and it's now installed just fine.
While it won't solve your disk woes, you at least helped a brother out!
Glad to hear it worked for you.
@@CRG Short answer to rhe question: "yes".
I contacted TDK if they would ever consider making brand new batches of floppies, they were polite but not interested. If we all signed a petition then maybe someone would!
good job for trying
Perhaps something along the lines of a gofundme, kickstarter etc would be needed to place the minimum order quantity for them to be interested,(you're probably looking in the region of 100,000s, if not millions of units, and not to knock your effort(taking the time to contact them shows great enthusiasm and go) but the old molds they used to manufacture them would have to be remade(which are not cheap), might explain the lack of interest from them, slow return on investment/too niche of a market, I'd love to see them reproduce those TDK cassettes, they were always great quality...
Sometimes costs like these can be very easily offset, if the whole project/product draws the company a lot of positive publicity and from a large demographic too.. how many people want to bring back physical media gaming, I would say quite a lot 👏
Back in the old days of fixing amiga disks that went though hell aka killed by magnetic fields of TV or Speakers ... you copied sectors to the same disc 5 to 8 times in "X-copy" ... fist you scan the disc to find if it has bad sectors in X-copy : 6 means BAD sector , 8 also means bad but its also means disc was damaged by magnetic fields ... then you simply mark those sectors and recopy them 5 to 8 times to the same disc... by this method you can fix many Amiga games ... when they boot and are good , you do a copy of it and store it ... but a word of warning, some Original Amiga discs had Sector DRM ...so even if you fix the Data , the Non-readable sectors of the DRM could be damaged making the disc fail ... but X-copy was the silver repair\piracy tool for all
Loving the Sensible Soccer big box!
Ruud Gullit!👍
I left my school disk in my shirt pocket. One trip round the washing machine later it was very clean! Still worked too, surprisingly.
That's one way to clean it 😂
I'm so glad I made disk images of all my old games that were on floppy's. When one of the originals gives an error, I succeeded sometimes in just writing the image I had again on the disk. Unfortunately this does not work all the time (if the disk is actually just broken beyond repair). What you can do to have the "original" disk, is pry open the floppy, and replace the disk with one of a floppy dat does work, and reassemble the floppy disk again. It's a bit of a hassle, but you can save the "housing" of the original floppy this way, with a working disk inside. I recommend "practising" this technique first with some floppies you don't actually need.
3.5" disk spindles have two holes in them, the center hole and a rectangular hole set off to the side. I have seen another design out there for the disk holding jig where the spindle turning thingy has 2 pins on it instead of 1, so it engages both of the holes in the spindle. That one would probably grip the spindle better so you wouldn't have the problem where the thing just spins in place.
Great idea clamping the thing in a vise. In hindsight it is totally obvious, but for whatever reason that idea never occurred to me.
I've had success cleaning floppies - I realise I was lucky with the batch I had and they were just dirty rather than damaged. Basically, crack open up the case at the bottom edge and drop out the disk itself. With a little neat washing up liquid, go all over both surfaces of the disk, rub it in well and give it time to work. If the disk comes away from the little metal carrier it sits on, don't worry about it for now. Now wash the soap off and make sure you dry the disk really well. Now you can re-attach the metal carrier VERY CAREFULLY with a small smear of superglue. Slide the disk and carrier back inside the case and seal the case with a tiny smear of superglue. Now test it. I've had success with this method but use it as a last resort ;)
Excellent video.
I have collection of Atari 1050 drives with 5.25" floppies.
These days when I use it I remove the lid to make sure the head is clean and that a disk doesn't leave dirt on the heads after use as this can damage the next disk put in the drive.
Also I keep my floppies well stored with moisture capture cartons in the same room. Seems to work!
Occasionally get the odd disk that develops a bad sector, and your demonstration is a brilliant way to fix it.
Great to see others with the same passion for retro!
All the best 🙂
I had WAY better results using warm soapy water (just a bit of dish soap) than I did with IPA. It did a phenomenal job cleaning off mold from some old disks. IPA just sort of smeared the crap around versus actually cleaning it. Said moldy disks had destroyed two of my floppy drives (Macintosh Sony variable speed drives, so it's not like I can just swap them around with generic drives.) Audible screeeach, then a thunk. Neither drive would read floppy disks after many attempts at cleaning the heads with IPA. However, after my success with cleaning the mold off the disks themselves with warm soapy water, I did the same with my floppy drives. Brought both drives back to life.
So if you have a disk that wasn't working after a clean with IPA, I'd say give warm soapy water a try. Use the IPA to clean any soap residue that might be left.
Please help me! I have already 3 drives of 5 1/4 that all they do is destroy disk after disk, they leave deep grooves on the disks and after cleaning and cleaning and more cleaning with alcool seems to make them worse and worse ! I dont know what to do ! I dont think its just a problem with moldy, flaky old disks ... it must be the drives themselves :(
@@fft2020 Unfortunately it sounds like a damaged heads on your drives if they're scratching disks.
I've just tried this on some discs I was imaging with a DiscFerret (same principles apply to Greaseweazle, which works the same way). Discs were showing patterns of errors in blotches on the HxC Floppy Editor "disc" view. I cleaned them with a foam swab and isopropyl and re-read them, and got a good read from most the second time around. Trying other brands of disc drive and cleaning the heads helped too.
Sadly I've yet to find a good solution for 3.5in discs where the hub has detached from the magnetic disc 'cookie'.
There is a discussion on EAB at the moment with regards disk cleaning, it may be worth checking out. I got the impression after skim reading that a lower concentration isoprop is what to go for. Have a read, it may help for future endeavours. I have to say, all your gear is remarkably clean and spanky looking. Whatever you're doing to keep it in that condition is excellent. I have recently gotten a few old Amigas to restore properly and certainly that level of cleanliness is my goal for them!
You can try my cleaning kit, you can find the download in the link in the description here: th-cam.com/video/I-MKpgO4nOY/w-d-xo.html. It uses the off center hole to turn the disk donut, and I use a microfiber cloth instead of a cotton bud which can leave dust inside the disk. I've cleaned more than 300 disks successfully with this thing. I don't really print and sell them anymore but you can have it done by a friend or online.
"I don't have a joystick connected."
Well then connect one!
Too much like hard work
@@CRG: LOL, if cleaning the disks didn't seem like too much hard work to do it on the video, then why would connecting a joystick seem like "too much hard work"?
@@HelloKittyFanMan if I say I was tired after cleaning them would you believe that? Or how about if I just admit to being to lazy to get one out of the drawer?
Good Video . Like you had in the video I have had mixed results with cleaning disks. If you do not have a 3D printer you can use a piece of tape to hold open the floppy's door while cleaning. As a last result I have written a floppy image to a new blank and swapped internals with the original to make a good working 'original'
With my Amiga I only use my disk drive to image disks. These can be created in ADF format for use and to backup the disk. You can also image out to a disk if it fails or the data gets corrupted.
Could you re-write a disk image to the disk to refresh the magnetic fields on them ?
I'm not sure to be honest, but might be worth trying it with the steel sky disks. It's not like I'll make them any worse.
Yes you can do that certainly. However the more you use the original the more likely you are to damage it. Especially now that the hardware used to read these old disks are getting old themselves. Old irreplaceable originals should be copied to a preferred media type and used from there instead.
Hi - Nice Video on a common problem
As there are 2 components, there is 2 places to look at first
Drive mechanism, most people clean the heads, but you should also do a alignment, there are some software floppy tools available to read a disk and determine its alignment most older drive units have a adjuster on them
Note original double density 5.25 x 360k and 3.5 720k driver have a stronger and wider rear write head, then the high density format came out the HD units can read and write to these but the HD systems do have a thinner rear/write head - so generally they can safely read and write , but some of the original Double Density drives may not really understand it -most times it is Ok - this is why for double density you should format them in a older double density drive and you can use them
Floppy media - these have 5 common faults
1. Age Dust - Mold on media
2. Age each magnetic particle is now weak or not refreshed it cannot hold a charge or lost the original
3. Physical scratch or flaw on the media
4. Heat
5. next to strong magnet
1. just clean it, you can simple blow the dust of or clean it as you demonstrated
2. This is trial and error, reformat the diskette, if the media particles are weak and faulty they will not hold a format, if you are lucky it will work, partially lucky maybe a few bad sectors and you can live with that as a data disk or files only ( ie nothing that is used for copywrite where it looks at a certain track / sector for information ). If it cant hold a format you should bin it - you can try formating or another disk drive or say apple / amiga but it will at best be borderline
4. Physical scratch - junk it - if it was part of a original box set, i would place a small colour sticker on it advising faulty and get a image and place on generic floppy
4. Heat will damage the coating on the diskette surface, best to bin it as it will be totally unstable
5. if you get the floppy next to a strong magnet eg HIFI speaker then you may have a change of reformatting it to reset the media
Any media - Tape - Floppy - Hard Drive - DATA FADE
While this is not really how it works, floppy media is like tape media, it has a coating, the coating is either readable or unreadable - a format sets the magnetic polarity to neutral, when you write to a floppy or tape it sets the polarity to +ve or -ve the magnetic equivalent of binary 1 or 0
With hard drives - if you dont use them often - eg backups, i like to use this every 6 months, it does defrag and checkdisk etc, but reads every sector and rewrites it to ensure it is writen on new fresh location with now a reset magnetic field
diskfresh www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html
I have no link with the company other than grabbing these free tools and using them in 2017
Regards
George
You might as well just leave them be and put copies of the disks in the box to use if you want imo
Get a greaseweazel USB magnetic flux writer device - then replace the internal magnetic part of your original discs with the internal parts from some good branded blank discs. Then just re-write the discs from disc images.
It's not at all unheard of for aging disks to read better in some drives than others. So it never hurts to try your problem disks in another drive.
Absolutely and I was getting hopeful for steel sky on the 286 but unfortunately it's just too far gone.
I've had some success with using compressed air and blowing it through the hole in the hub and around the outside of the hub. Also through the door both sides. I use a compressor with water trap filter and a pressure regulator to drop the pressure. Doesn't always work but worth a try.
Great video.
Thanks.
Thanks for the video. Nicely done. I’m working on some 5.25 disks at the moment and just as you said the magnetic field stuff is going over my head. Trying to learn a bit more though. Kryoflux makes a card to read disks with weak fields (could make a dad joke here, but will hold off). Keep the vids coming.
The magnetic stuff does get a bit complicated. Good lick sorting your 5.25" disks and Dad jokes are always welcome 😁
Why didn't someone design the knob so that it would have a key that plugs into that other hole in the hub? And why does it have that wedge notch in it?
Sounds like a case of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ - but if your big box games are dying, it’s definitely worth a pop.
Aside, out with of something like FluxEngine (which isn’t hard btw) to try and recover the original images have you thought about downloading disk images from online and writing them to different disks, and then transferring the magnetic platters into the original floppy cases?
Either way, great video, and very informative. Thanks.
That's probably the next stop for the likes of those steel sky disks, swap out the platters and rewrite the contents. Not that's is really necessary since you can always use a modern alternative but still nice to try and keep the old media going.
@@CRG Since when has collecting big box games about being able to get them elsewhere?
How do you open them up to get dirt out?
Nice vid, How long did it take to print the holder?
Thanks, I think it took about 20 minutes to print the holder.
Hi Glen... lots of info here but I don't know if any is actually of use to you. Around 6 or so months ago I was really struggling with floppies. It turned out to be a UEFI/motherboard/win7 problem and not the actual drives and floppies themselves, but it looked like it was the floppies at the time. As a result I bought loads of new old stock, and drives, and old pirate disks to use as blanks, and I also have a load of boxed games.
I'm a bit funny in that I do not want to use goteks at all. Ideally I want to use real floppy disks and I have various machines that use 3", 3.5" and 5.25".
So far I've noticed that boxed games have disks that last way better than the ones in cardboard boxes or in the plastic 80 disk boxes. It may be down to better quality of disk but I suspect it's more to do with how they're stored. I think it's something out of the following - dust, mould, spilt drinks, hot/cold cycles, sweat/grease freezing/thawing, damp that causes the problems. I think a bit of grease on the surface of a disk in 1989 might see it still working in 1990, but by 2020 it could have killed it. I don't know if it's some or all of those conditions, though.
Something you didn't mention, or at least I don't think you did. And something nobody else really seems to mention either is the paper disc inside the disk. Inside each disk there are two and they're glued to the plastic housing. They can be removed if you break the disk open a bit. I don't know if it needs to be opened all the way or if you could grab and pull them out with tweezers.
The white discs are there to keep the magnetic surface clean but I have a huge suspicion that they can end up killing the disks, and I think that's what killed your Monkey Island disk. I think debris can get lodged on the white disc and rub against the magnetic surface and that's why you might see lines on it.
I also think the white discs could end up deforming and end up growing in size - imagine a piece of paper that gets splashed and dries - and that is what the nasty sound is of old disks spinning, it's the swollen white disk rubbing against the magnetic surface. I don't know if a swollen disc will hinder the disk spinning to the point it causes errors? I don't know if a problem disk can have the white paper discs removed and perhaps it might help.
As for cleaning the disks with IPA I would suggest it's only done where a problem is found. I have the same frame and knob as you - if only it was really that simple to get a bigger knob - and I've used it successfully on disks.
The disks I fixed were bulk new old stock. These were clearly budget disks and had been presumably sealed into a plastic bag in 50s 25+ years ago. Some of them I could see some kind of contaminant on them and with IPA and a cotton bud I was able to clean them, and by repeatedly trying to format them I got them working.
The problem with this is that for an ST or Amiga disk we need 100% of it to work, but if it's a PC disk and there's a few bad sectors we can probably still get away with it.
I've lots more I want to do with disks - and I have over 1,000 NOS and blanks to play with but it won't be for a long time.
I would expect, and this is going out on a limb that eventually I will take a commercial game disk and break it open (they can be resealed with glue) and remove the dead disk and replace it with a working one that I've written in Greaseweazle and by doing that I will have repaired the game disk, and it will be identical to what it once was.
I also don't agree with people that say that all disks are going to die and they have a finite lifespan. I don't think that's necessarily true. We don't know what the rate of decay on the disks is, but there's no reason to assume that it's going to happen in our lifetimes, maybe it will, maybe it won't.
I hope that in some way helps Glen, sorry it's such a long read.
Thanks for the detailed comment.
The white bit inside the disks is like a cotton which as you say is there to keep the disk clean. As far as I know its on this surface that the mold grows which then has potential to damage the disks surface.
The damage on the Monkey Island disk could be caused by that but I think it more likely that the disks surface has degraded and probably from environmental factors. The glue that binds the magnetic media to the disk can breakdown causing said media to come away and I think that's what happened here.
The disks maybe spend 20 years in a roof space, an environment which here in the UK can be damp, dry, cold or hot throughout the year so it's no surprise there are problems.
If I knew then what I know now they wouldn't have been stored like that but it is what it is.
As for the lifepsan, I don't think they'll live forever but I also don't see why a good disk can't keep on going for many many years yet. While I don't really use them on the Amiga I do use them regularly on my PCs. It's really the only means of getting initial software onto the older machines.
@@CRG I'm not sure about that, the monkey island disk looks like disks I've got where the visible damage on the surface is a perfect circle, just like what would be formed if a bit of grit was on the disc scratching it. Or at least that's my best guess and I'm not letting go of it :) I suppose it doesn't matter either, by the point we can see the damage it's done and so is the disk.
I do wonder if the dirt that came off that cotton bud wasn't dirt but was part of the disk.
Since its beyond repair anyway I'll open that disk up tomorrow and take a look.
I suppose it's possible a bit of grit or something got in there but its also known that the iron feroxide surface can come off.
As I say I'll take a look tomorrow and maybe stick a picture up on twitter or the community tab here.
That's why I always try to create a disk image of my original software. Fortunately, I was able to do it to most of the disks I bought first hand. But some of the games I bought used was 'no go'. Conquest of Camelot, for instance, the 3.5" disks were all good, but the 5.25, kids 1 to 4 were unreadable, but I've not tried to clean them yet.
Also, in the past, I've made the error of putting dirty disks (with mould) in a drive... the movement and contact with the drive head was enough to damage the oxide layer.
It is also crucial to clean the disk drive after this type of incidents, to avoid contaminating other floppies.
Yep, certainly a good idea to backup. Not something I ever though of back in the 90s though.
Great video and congrats on the 2k+ subs mate. That's awesome. Re disk cleaning, sadly I had already tried this exact method on an entire Tenstar Games pack for the Amiga, including Barbarian. Now to be fair, ALL Ten were terrible, none loaded except Mercenary (once) and ALL made horrid scraping noises. The A500 itself was hardly used by it's previous owner. As a result, the drive is squeaky clean and all other disks work 100% fine all the time. So.....I took to cleaning the disks as you did, and NONE worked and then even Mercenary failed. They all continued to make horrid noises and Barbarian disk failed completely to the point the disk surface came away from the center wheel. Why? Well, because this method "can" be too harsh. Apparently the better method is to use a little ISO on a macrofibre. Using the caddy you printed, you hold the disk open and hold the fiber lightly on BOTH sides of the disk while turning the wheel. This applies much less ISO than the botton bud method and is less abrasive to the surface of the disk. Seems like a fine art. NOW....all that aside, I did also clean 2 Amiga Format cover disks with the cotton bud method (STOP OVERRIGHTING OR BINNING THOSE BY THE WAY lol ;) ) and they seemed to fail. I randomly tried them again a few months later. They first failed...and then...they both WORKED! So.....I dunno lol. I think it's a very fine art and depends greatly on the reason for the initial failure. Going forward, I'll be looking to get a Greeseweazle to restore original disk images to new media, and swap out the guts. Also risky but I can't make the disks any worse than they are now lol.
I´m a bit late, but there are my 2 cents in the 3d printer issue. The wall-infill gaps can have several causes:
- Improper filament diameter. Unfortunately, some brands don´t give the full 1.75 section so there´s some under extruding. Test with the caliper to average the size and adjust the material in Cura if it´s wrong.
- Printing speed, temp, flow, retraction settings can affect the results too. Ideally some testing to catch the ideal settings for every material can give the best result.
As the overall quality seems quite decent (on camera, though), I´d suggest going straigt to measure the filament, and if it´s ok just seek the "outline overlap" setting and rise it a bit. You can also rise the flow a bit if other areas lack material too (when you point the gaps the top right area printing lines look a bit empty).
Hope it helps. Cheers
I used to open the disk, and then clean CAREFULY prependicular from the center to the outside, and then put the disk inside the plastic case again , and close-it. and it worked for me.
I was going to try opening the disks but thought it would be easier to just work through the door. Also gave me a good excuse to use the 3D printer 😉
Once you succeed in rescuing a whole set of disks by cleaning them, you ought to try to find any NOS disks of the same density that you can back them up to, as well as backing them up as install images onto a hard disk, optical, flash, or all 3, if it seems like someone hasn't done so already, so that you might not lose that game from all functional existence.
Sometimes I magnet wipe disks that look physically clean but still has errors. This can often refresh/restore them (magnetically) and allow you to rewrite the original image back on to them without errors.
That might be worth trying on the likes of the steel sky disks. Just need to find a strong enough magnet.
Just blindly cleaning the disks won't give much success. You need to pair it up with something like Greaseweazle (flux level reader/writer) so that you can dump an image of the disk an analyse it for errors. Greaseweazle can also be used to rewrite original images back to the disk, or to a donor disk and then replace the damaged and unrecoverable media.
very interesting that outcome... reminds me of the consistency I had back in those days with my own games/programs especially making it 5 discs in all the way to 8x% only to have it fail the moment you speak. I can still taste the frustration from my own 386/486/P90 😝 lol
I think it was moments like the one where it worked till you spoke that are probably responsible for creating superstition in my life 🔮
I've found useful, for old and apparently bad damaged floppies, to let them mildly dry below my A1200 w Blizzard. After a few hours "warming", they turned readable and working again. In my case it was moisture, not dirty. Cheers, M
Anything is worth trying and I'll give it a go with some of my other dodgy disks. Thanks for the tip.
I did it few hours ago and now my FDD is not working and disk which was partially ureadable now is completly damaged.
Fun relaxing vid as always..... well as soon as ya get over the big hairy angry bear lad having floppy issues..... (just teasing)
Use superformat (part of fdutils, available with most linux distros) to low-level-format the diskette.
Something worth considering is to make copies of your important collectable disks onto a preferred media type and only use the copies. You'd be surprised how many HD floppies can fit on to a modern sized media like flash disks or HDDs.
Yep worth doing. I rarely use floppies these days but the point was more to see if I could revive known bad disks. At this point my big box games are display items only, especially on the Amiga since I just use WHDLoad for everything.
As far as I know there is no exact or reliable way to restore original floppies. Not trying to read them today would be the best method of keeping them intact. An unfortunate paradox.
That being said just having them in their original boxed is pretty awesome. Nice collection. I certainly wish I had kept all my old big box PC games.
HD discs were always a bit more flakey than DD if i remember correctly.?
I've heard some say that in later years of disk manufacturing the quality maybe wasn't as good so they don't last. Probably some truth in that but in my experience more of my DD disks have failed than HD.
I remember changing the spring tension of my floppy drive to get some disks to read properly. It's heads had some raised sections on the top where the tension spring sat and had 3 positions. Found I usually had to weaken the tension when I used HD disks for some reason. Maybe they're thicker?
Isn't this because of the narrower field of stored data on HD - it's a finer process - rather than the quality of the disks themselves?
So IPA could cause issues. I know it's good for cleaning the heads of disk and tape drives but those tend to me made up of metallic or similar material. Any plastic-based material can be impacted, esp depending on the strength of it (i.e. 99% is worse than 50%' -- I tested a bunch of products on plastics after I damaged a portable amp's exterior surface and IPA causes a chemical reaction on certain types of material). Here is part of an abstract of a paper about restoring magnetic recording media (fixing "sticky shed"): "A liquid cleaner, such as isopropyl alcohol, is applied to the Backcoating to dissolve it from and clean it off the Mylar Base. Before the liquid cleaner is applied, steps are taken to prevent the cleaner fluid from getting onto the Oxide side of the tape. The chemical cleaning is done as quickly as possible... the Oxide side of the tape is given a dry, non-chemical cleaning to remove the residue of contamination of the Backcoating which was deposited on the Oxide side of the tape as the result of physical contact with the Backcoating from the storage on the reel ..."
The stuff I used is 70%. There certainly didn't appear to be any physical problems from it although as you seen a few of the disks didn't read as well after cleaning. I'll test them again and see if perhaps they have further degraded. Perhaps the solution here is to clean then dry yourself, rather than leave it to dry as I did.
Just curious-- Is it possible to replace the media inside the case from a good disk without irrepairably damaging the original disk?
Yep there's no reason you couldn't do it and I may take this approach to fix the likes of Monkey Island.
Only thing you need to watch is that the disks are generally glued together so you need to be careful opening them.
@@CRG I was about to suggest this but made sure to read the comments.
Replacing the disc inside seems like a good option to try on permanently damaged disk where a rewrite is not an option or did not work.
Have opened disk before but was so long ago.
Would be nice with a video of that.
I would consider the disk original if the internal disk is replaced and rewritten with a proper image that is original to.
@@CRG I've done this with more than one AmigaDOS based Amiga game (Flashback immediately springs to mind). Found a disk image online, copied the contents to a known good disk, then gently opened the original game & copied disks and swapped the good copy disk media into the original case, then glued the game disk case back together again. Very satisfying to get an otherwise good big boxed game working again.
As a general rule I've always stored my original game disks in the original game box, nowadays taking no chances by putting them in sealable plastic bags too. The vast majority of them hav been fine. Disks that have been stored in less than perfect conditions inside old plastic floppy storage boxes (more open to the atmosphere) are the ones that have suffered with muck/mould. Thrown hundreds away as they were dirtying my floppy drives.
fixed several Amiga disk with this :)
Glad to hear it worked for you.
Set an ender 3 to 108% if you want a perfect and very snug fit with the printed knobs square into the disks spindle key hole :)
I just cleaned 4 of my Amiga disk drives the other day, 2 of them were not reading anything but now they all are. Never tried cleaning any disks yet but I have my Amiga big box games mainly as shelf fillers anyway and play them from hard disk when I want to.
So are mine, as I said most of us in Amiga land are using whdload but I was simply curious to see if cleaning would do anything.
Did you try formatting and checking for bad sectors after cleaning up?
No I didn't bother doing that as in the first place I wanted to see if it was possible to recover the disks by simply cleaning.
I may do this with the steel sky disks and see if I can then rewrite the original contents back.
Regarding the noisy disk, I'd be worried about that as noise means vibration from friction, and friction on that media is not good... Probably a larger than normal particle is caught in the felt lining of the disk internals and is rubbing on the surface of the disk.
I would be cautious of the IPA as I use that as a solvent in some cases.. I guess it could make matters worse for the media, though it seemed ok. Maybe some IPA was still on the disc, absorbed by the same felt lining of the disc, making it grab it more and slow it down?
I would only do this to problematic discs though, if it works, don't clean it maybe?
Finally, for magnetic fading, maybe invest in a Kyroflux and rewrite a flux file from someone else's working copy back to the disk? Needed for some originals due to their complex copy protection.
I'd agree if it isn't broke don't try to fix it so if your disks are working then just leave well enough alone. I'm not sure the IPA will damage the disk surface, the stuff I used is 70% but point taken than stronger stuff may eat into it.
While it seems only a few minutes passed in the video it was probably more an hour between cleaning and when I started to test so I would expect that any IPA would have dried in that time.
As for the damage I'm going to pull open that Monkey Island disk alter to inspect the felt. Just want to see if there is any dirt in there that might have caused the damage.
My understanding is that it works for dirty disks (dirty with dust and other particles), but not for scratched disks. As for "de-magnetized" (if that's a word in english? :)) I think I remember that some disk utilities claimed to "revive" somewhat those kind of disks... My memeory may be failing, here though :(
As usual, very cool vid :)
That's basically my understanding too and it did seem to work here on 2 of the games.
SpinRrite was able to analyze magnetic flux and work out if it was a 1 or a 0 by doing multiple reads an even moving the heads back and forth to different tracks to get a better "look" and rewrite the surface, but that was mainly for HDDs I believe that it supported. IO remember using it with some success on floppy disks though..
@@DarkAlaranth spinrite can be very good to revive disks BUT it maybe end up permanently destroying the data... I have a few ARJ files on disks that spinrite managed to "correct" but now the ARJ gives crc errors and never was able to recover the data. I would try to get the data manually first even if it kept failing and failing "data errors" and even try the disks one a few different drives. Sometimes a different drive will read sectors that another couldn'.t. And only use spinrite AFTER to refresh the surface and re-record the data back into the disk.
Nice job!
I think the combination of ageing drives and heads combined with ageing floppy disk material means they should be immediately converted to ADF files and then write the data back to new disks if you want to still use floppies? I think with the advent of Gotek drives and some new improved Gotek like drives, the era of floppies is long over, they are too slow and too prone to failure. Practically every Amiga I have bought and refurbished has had faulty drives and yes you can fix them, but it's probably not worth the hassle. To me it's a bit like vinyl disks, when I got a new album I would immediately record it to the best quality tapes I could afford and never use the disk again until my tape wore out and then I would buy a new one and record from the album again. So over many years the disk would only be read a few times keeping the wear caused by the record player needle to a minimum. I think floppies are now the same, the act of reading the disks causes wear so you want to keep it to a minimum so I would record to ADF and use the ADFs instead of wearing the disk any more than you have to. At least if you have the box and the disk and the manuals you can prove that you have the right to own the ADF files. Also keeping the boxes and manuals is a good collector thing as they look good on your shelves even if the disk no longer works.
I’d recommend Steve Gibson’s SpinRite disk recovery software for resurrecting floppies and hard drives. You can find out more here: www.grc.com/
If I use alcohol will it do the same? (I don't care if the data gets corrupted lol)
You could try it but since making this I think the best liquid for the job would be head cleaner.
I was hoping that cleaning would fix the disks, because I have a ton of disks that doesn't get read or have errors. I have some old porn, errr important files that I would like to retrieve. :P
floppy disks are all ticking time bombs
Maybe you have missalign the driveheads?
hah I thought you will clean them up and they'll magically work, I share your disappointment. I have a few games with the same fate, I'll still give them a clean but I don't have high hopes, especially after watching your video. Thanks for trying!
ORRRR.... you could just take the shutter off, clean and spin the disk, and then reattach the shutter.
it works! thnks!
I was looking to get an amiga and try using floppies again but after watching this. I am calling it 2024 the floppy disc is dead long live disc images
Playing an Amiga Disk is no Guarantee of wholeness.
Try scanning with x-copy or similar.
I thought you were going to split the disks to clean them.
That's correct and I had considered adding this to the video but though it was long enough as is.
Good video, but why do you British/Irish guys never pronounce the "t" in your words?
Change your title !! That’s not floppy disks 🤦🏻♂️
And what would you call them?
Floppy disks are 5.25 and they flop, does the disks u clean flop? I’m just saying
Yeah the bit inside it flops
Putting a facepalm emoji doesn't make you any less wrong.
@@BumdanglerFartbiscuitin some parts of the UK, 3.5"s were called “stiffy disks” especially among teens of the late 80s early 90s. It didn’t catch-on long-term though, especially because they were always called microfloppy in the US. I kinda wonder if OP was talking about that, albeit in a really annoying way!