Fun fact courtesy of the resplendent PixelMusement: When using the weaker magnet you were technically damaging the data, but only temporarily. The weaker magnet lacks the strength to permanently realign the oxide particles in the short term, so when the magnetic force is removed the particles naturally go back to how they want to be. A strong magnetic force is necessary to realign the particles permanently and instantly and the weaker that magnetic force gets the longer it needs to be sustained to permanently realign the particles.
Hey All, I have a tale of floppy disk + magnets of my own, wanna read it? It's a bit long so make yourselves comfortable... Are you ready? Then I'll begin: Back in 1988(ish) when i had my first Spectrum +3, one of my diskettes got corrupted thanks to a faulty fridge, which sent spikes out on the mains every time it started. Now, as you may know, the +3 uses 3-inch floppies, but i can't say for sure if this has any bearing on what happened after. Either way, the disk didn't work at all, in fact i couldn't even format it. This was quite bad, since those 3" disk were rather expensive, and i was broke, so i didn't want to just throw it out. What does one do in such a situation? Well, after some thought, i took a small loudspeaker with a ferrite magnet and took it apart, then broke the magnet in two chunks, which i then wrapped in tissue paper, and put both chunks in contact with the disk surface, one chunk on each side of the disk, while rotating the disk by hand. This procedure was meant to hopefully destroy the formatting so that i could reuse the disk. However, this had no effect whatsoever, the disk was still unusable. It was then time to bring out the "big guns", i decided, and took a small mains tranformer apart by removing the yoke that normally completes the magnetic circuit of the transformer. I then proceeded to move the thusly modified trafo in circles on both sides of the floppy. The magnetic field from the trafo was so strong that the aluminum shotter made a rather loud rattlinig noise due to eddy currents. Alas, this had no effect either, so i was on the verge of giving up, but i then remembered that i had recently typed in a File unerase program from a listing in Your Sinclair. I therefore disassembled the machine code, and was able to modify it into a very primitive sort of Disc Doctor program, just to see WTH was going on on my floppy disk. As it turned out, the very first byte of the "Disk Signature" on the diskette had been changed, and after a further modification of my Disc Doc program to enable it to write back to disk, i restored the Disk Signature to its correct value, and Lo! and Behold, the entire contents of the disk was back as it had been before the corruption took place. Cheers from Denmark, and thanks for reading my story.
BertyFromDK what disk signature? Do floppy disk have a subchannel of some sort? I though all the hardware configuration was done with the holes in the plastic casing.
Hi Laharl Krichevskoy No, there is no subchannel, and all synchronisation is indeed done via the hole, so let me try to explain: When the Spectrum +3 was designed by Amstrad, who at that point had bought the rights to the Spectrum brand from Clive Sinclair, they used virtually the same disk format as had previously been used on their own line of PCW wordprocessing computers. This disk format includes the aforementioned disk signature, in the form of the text string "PLUS3DOS" which is placed in the beginning of sector 0. On Amstrad's other computers of the time, the PCW line, and the CPC line, similar formats were used, with the disk signature reflecting which machine a given diskette had been formatted on. Because of the similarity between these formats, at least the Spectrum +3 was able to read and write to the other types, but not format them. Anyway, becuase the signature on the disk in my tale had been corrupted, my +3 was unable to do anything with the disk - it couldn't even reformat the disk! It was only after i had altered the unerase program that i had typed in from a magazine listing, and turned it into a sort of primitive disk doctor, that i was able to see, and then restore, the damage that had occurred. Please feel free to ask more questions if my explanation is unclear. :) Greetings from Denmark.
P.S. The reason all these computers, the +3, the CPC range, and the PCW range, had similar formats was because it enabled them to run CP/M, the old 8-bit operating system that was quite popular back in the late 70's and early 80's. CP/M even came bundled with the PCW machines, and the CPC6128/CPC664, but for the CPC464* and the +3 it had to be bought separately. *The CPC464 didn't have a built-in disk drive, so an external drive had to be purchased in order to use disk software on that machine.
There is a big difference in the kind of disks - original and high resolution. The latter one uses high coersive force magnetic material. But both of them could be reset by a Radio Shack Tape Cassette Eraser, as I found. In fact, I had more than once floppy disks that could not be read, nor reformatted - until I treated them with the Tape Cassette Eraser. No problem formatting after that. 5.25” floppies were easier also because the housing material is thin. On the 3.5” hard case disks you don’t get as close to the magnetic material, so the shape of the magnetic (AC ) field might need to be taken into account.
In high school we had BBC's and mostly BBC branded monitors. When you switched the screens off, they created a spectacular amount of static. You could stick things to the screen with the static...things like 5 1/4" floppies. Turned out to be quite effective at ruining peoples work. ...children are awful :)
Most crt's did that and I used to stick pieces of paper to a television when I was a kid, and it could also pull your hair up like a charged balloon. The downside was dust attraction.
Most CRT monitors have an electromagnetic degaussing coil that activates when they are first plugged into the wall...the degauss circuit probably erased the disk.
I swear I've owned disks that, by the time I've taken them out my mate's PC and put them in mine, they've become corrupt. And then there was the school floppy that went through the washing machine in my shirt pocket, which still works.
James Grimwood the big thing is that different disk drives can be misaligned from each other, so it's probably not that the disk was "corrupted" but rather that your drive just couldn't read disks your friend's drive wrote.
Probably, also we did used to buy the suspiciously cheap packets of disks from the local market. That being the local market that sold "shareware" that looked like it'd come off the previous month's PC Format.
Yes i was confused by this too, some disks couldnt hold data over 1 week, while others lasted over 20 years... when i googled i found out that the older disks from the 80s and early 90s were MUCH better, and especially A brand ones from that time will keep their data for 30+ years, while newer floppys from the late 90s are generally expected to randomly lose data, sometimes within weeks, sometimes maybe a few years
One of the most frustrating things that ever happened to me was a pair of CD-R's where the backside came off within about a year of writing data onto them. Haven't trusted them since. 100 year lifespan. Hah! Yeah right! Floppy disks are a bit less predictable than that. Though I'm contemplating getting a drive controller specifically made for archival purposes. It attempts to read the magnetic flux transitions directly, meaning it will read exactly what is on the disk, rather than trying to interpret it according to some specific logic, as most floppy drives do. Amongst other things this lets you read disks formatted in weird ways, the actual contents of corrupted sectors (including those which were corrupted deliberately for 'copy protection' purposes), and the low level formatting information itself. While it's primary purpose is creating reliable archival copies of disks no matter what kind of computer wrote them, nor what weird formatting and data tricks it might be using to try and prevent it being copied properly, I have a feeling the nature of how it works is likely to do a much better job reading corrupted disks too. If nothing else, a disk image of the low level flux transitions would be a much better starting point for data reconstruction than what a typical disk drive gives you. You'd have a pretty reliable indication of any corruption both in the data, and the formatting of the disk, and that couldn't hurt. Depending on the accuracy, since it's measuring flux transitions you might also get some sense of any data that was partially overwritten, since it may mostly be in one state, but contain a few weird elements that indicate other states it's been in... Short of using an electron microscope you're probably not getting a better result than that. XD
Yeah cheap CDRs have the same type of problem, I think there is no real reliable backup storage media to be found, they can all just go "poof" randomly... especially after 10+ years. The only real reliable way would probably be to store it on at least 3 different media, and you will have to check all 3 every year, once 1 fails make a new one.... wich sucks. Im looking for a single storage device that will hold data for 30+ years, wich you can just store in a closet without having to ever look at it!
Guess I'll go stick some floppy disks on the fridge to freak the family out. Whether they'll be more concerned about the data on it or the fact that I still have floppy disks I don't know.
A more "cientific" way to determine if data corruption took place you can get an md5 hash on the disk, even the most slight change in the data will result totally different, the only problem is that not so interesting and graphic as trying to load paperboy :-)
While I'm sure the contents are just fine, it still irks me whenever I see kitchen magnets on a PC case. They may not be doing any harm, but it's just good practice not to tempt the photons.
If you have to use a magnet, use the rubber lodestone business card sheet magnets...they aren't a very high flux level and are unlikely to cause problems.
This reminds me of the early 90s when I worked as a junior mainframe operator one of my jobs was tape storage, and I was in charge of a small room with a bulk tape eraser in the center, also we had the coolest robot tape archive machine too.
I broke Disk 1 of Project X on the Amiga by putting my phone on it for by accident. it was there for several hours. I also knackered my laptop's HDD by accidently placing one of those magnetic dishes on my laptop right over where the HDD was. I realised what I was doing just as I felt the dish pull downwards. Ever heard a HDD disc scream in pain? I had to replace it.
Anyone who has ever opened a hard drive knows there's incredibly strong magnets which actuate the arm. It was an interesting test, and I think it would have been a bit more interesting if a hash of the data had been performed to make sure every single byte was still intact. But I was somewhat confident that the more casual magnet contact early on would have been okay.
Back in the 80's I worked for a Disk Manufacturer. We used to use a bulk eraser to clean disks after testing. Basically the disk passed through a gap between 2 metal plates filled with magnets. The varying filed effectively erased everything on the disks. Could be done at high speed as well. Till we started formatting every disk the disk bulk erasure was part of the manufacturing process.
Those magnets guide the electron beam and are around the thin end of the tube, deep inside the monitor (and they are not that strong). Since magnetic force falls off quadratically, they cannot affect anything, Degaussing on the other hand energizes a coil near the screen, and pretty violently. So degaussing may have a small chance of flipping a bit on the disk while guiding coils do not.
When I was growing up, we used a 13" Magnavox television as a color monitor for our Apple IIc. If you left a disk on top of it and powered the television up, the degaussing coil would corrupt data on the disk basically every time. Compared to computer monitors, those small TVs had very little room between the edge of the CRT where the degaussing coil lived and the top of the plastic case. I'm sure that was responsible for a lot of floppy disk deaths in the 80s.
The quality of the disc matters as well. I found in the early 90s that if I took some floppies on a train with me, and left them in a sports bag in the overhead shelf, the good discs (BASF, Maxell etc) would be fine. But some cheap Chinese discs I had bought in bulk, which were absolutely fine otherwise, would be partially or sometimes completely wiped in the same conditions - but if i kept them in my coat pocket, they were fine. I found the same as you; a corrupted disc would reformat and continue operating just fine. These cheaper discs must have recorded a more marginal signal, and the magnetism of the overhead electric line in the train just enough to wipe them.
Here's another twist and I swear it's true. When I was kid, me and my brother played a game on the Amiga called Wolfpack, or we tried to play it and it sucked so much we decided to destroy it with a magnet. Instead of destroying it, it kinda got permanent, at least at the time, because afterwards we could not actually initialize (format) the disk, because when we attempted to do so it would fail and the game would just keep working.
The floppy issue I had was not with magnets or markers, but condensation. I wanted to sell my Amiga 500 and I was told to put it in the extension of our house, which was prone to dampness, and after a while, any floppies I put into the A500 were practically erased by microscopic water droplets, which was infuriating when I was trying to demonstrate the machine to potential buyers. Luckily, I was able to relocate the Amiga, eventually sell it and use the money to buy Doom 2 on CD-ROM.
@"Nostalgia Nerd" You could have tried quickly wiggling the weaker magnet against the floppy. That might have been more effective than just putting it against it or moving it in circles. Also, the bit about putting them agains the screen may be related to the degaussing coil, which does generate a strong oscilating magnetic field, that "dissolves" the undesired magnetization of the screen.
This is not a very accurate experiment. If a bit is filpped, BMP will most likely have a single pixel changed - it may be quite hard to spot. However, that same bit can completely ruin any compressed data. Furthermore, windows may cache thumbnails (in files "thumbs.db") and only reads those, not the images themselves, unless you actually open one. The problem with this is that thumbnail file is tiny, so only a small portion of disk surface is tested. You should have filled the disks entirely and did a CRC check (uncompressing a ZIP does that too).
The individual sectors on a disk are already CRC protected on a hardware level (the controller creates and checks it), so you lose either 512 byte or nothing.
Precisely drawing on your floppies can defeat certain types of copy protection, like the ones where the original puts a physical hole in the plastic. The software would try to write data to the sector, and when read back, get all 0s. On an "undamaged" copy, the data read back would be whatever was written, and the software would then detect the piracy. Similar techniques were later used on CDs/DVDs, notably the PlayStation "wobble groove"
Does Windows 98 cache preview images on non-permanent media like floppys? Was wondering that the whole time because the previews seemed to load pretty quick sometimes
You can see the "Generating preview" text before the preview image displayed. I assume he just cut footage for time. No need to show that tedious slow task of opening each file.
When I was in high school I was an aide to the school computer tech we had tons of 98 boot desks stuck to the side of our computers with magnets they worked fine every time but we always got odd locks from it 🤣
I once tried to build a floppy eraser. That is a rather strong electromagnet running on AC mains. I ran a check on the test diskette by some Norton utility (I think) that gave a graphic overview of the diskettes condition. To blobs marked the poles of the magnet. The rest was just fine. Then I tried with a "degausser" built for tape recorders. The pile of floppies began humming and all content was gone. I did not try reformatting, it was some data that were to be discarded - safely. When I had to dispose of some magnetic tapes that just might contain something, I cut them up with a saw. I took a while and was quite funny. That was old large spools of tape.
I actually use a neodymium magnet to "demagnetize" double-density 5.25in floppy disks before formatting and writing to them in high-density drives, since it improves the chances of them working in older double-density drives by clearing out the garbage data that would otherwise confuse the wider read head on the older drive. It works quite well actually.
6:58 So...what blipvert were you trying to inflict upon us? (I couldn't pause at the right time to see what it was). **EDIT** Hah! Nope, I feel no urge to go to Sainsburys to check out their Gary range.
Try this with a VHS cassette! The tale of someone walking up and down all the aisles in blockbuster video with an earth magnet in their pocket, destroying all the movies in the store.... even all the copies of Weekend at Burnie's 2 :)
Used to fly into Belfast City Airport very regularly for work. This was during the troubles. Every 3.5' disc I had would be blanked when they went through xray scanner at the airport. Ended up having to post discs ahead of visit.
on win98 era my floppies kept getting corrupt for no apparent reason. eventually ifound out that it was the floppy drive that was corrupting them. THAT BASTARD. *SOB* and now that i 've got this out of my system i'll mourn for garry if you'll excuse me >8'((
I'm surprised how much magnet these disks could take here. When we were kids, we did intentionally corrupt some unimportant 3.5" floppies with normal household magnets. Though we did slide that protective cover of a disk a side, so that magnet was touching actual disk surface and we kept it there for a good while.
Hey Nostalgia Nerd! I always though the 3.5 inch floppies are called stiffies in the UK. I deeply remember a day when a UK student circa year 2000 approched me in a computer lab asking if I have a stiffy... Deeply embarising moment... It was in Los Angeles...
You can get the sticky / sticker residue off surfaces (such as CD , DVD cases & those raggedy-ass looking 3.5" floppies) with orange oil - it's dirt cheap and should be available from your local supermarket in the cleaning section.
About 13 years ago, I unthinkingly placed a little speaker on my crowded desk on top of an external usb hard drive. It sat there for a day or 2 before I noticed that the hard drive wasn't showing up anymore and I had to go back to Disk Manager and reinitialize my now blank 1TB disk.
I did something similar with a normal magnet back in the days we mostly used 5 1/4" and like you I found that there was no data corruption. And like you I did not take this to mean that using storing magnets and floppies together is okay. Some peoples say you should not use magnetized screwdrivers to work on a computer or more precisely its hard disk, I myself never had any problem. How about giving this video a sequel that use a hard disk insted of a floppy?
Horshoe magnet can easily corrupt the disk only if you put the floppy betweet the north and south pole. The reason it didnt do anything on the disk is because you didnt test it. Data saves in the disk by applying magnetism. North on top and south on bottom for 1, and south on top and north on bottom for 0.
perm marker ... sounds like the hole-in-platter copy-protection I recently learned about. (this copy protection tried to write to a specific sector that was 'situated' in the aforementioned hole and would perform an insta-kill on level 3 if it succeeded.)
Nostalgia Nerd I´m not a native english speaker, but I try: The magnetic "range" of neodymium is always lower than equally strong Ferro magnets. Something to consider when comparing the "length". :) Why this is, I can´t say.
I remember being so scared of magnets near my discs also in the 90s in the UK there was a craze for ionizers and I was also really worried about ionisers near the discs
When I was in middle school I had to use floppies to carry data for one of my classes and they kept getting erased until I started carrying them in a shielded case in my pocket instead of just a plastic one.
when you are running out of space on floppy, shake it a bit so data moves more together and free up some space. (I've seen this in one old czech computer magazine}
Would be neat to fill one entirely with a large uncompressed image and be able to see the damage. Though if the header of the file or the disks formatting gets messed up it wouldn't work, you can copy paste the header back into the file, so if you can get the data off of a floppy without the formatting, then it might be doable.
i put a floppy on a magnetic stirrer back in the late 80s or so - which has a HUGE magnetic flux - you could BARELY pry the thing off of it - the last test was 20 minutes on the stirrer (alternating magnetic field of course) and you could read and copy the floppy JUST FINE
It always amazed me how paranoid people were about using a small fridge magnet to hold a note to the side of a computer case. You couldn't convince them that it would have no effect on the data on their drives.
You will hear tell of people sticking floppy diskettes to things with magnets and damaging their data, and many of these are true. This is because the oldest floppy diskette (and full-size 8" jobs) formulations weren't as magnetically strong and were easily disrupted. The formulations used in 1.2, 1.44, 2.4 & 2.88 MByte floppies are strong enough that common magnets won't hurt them, but strong electromagnets, large magnets, and rapidly oscillating magnetic fields (like those generated by certain mechanical telephone bells) can injure them.
it takes 200 gauss to erase a floppy and about 15.000 to erase a hard disk. any old degausser will work. the reason disks can be erased near a monitor is largely due to the automatic degaussing coil placed around the CRT.
I have always been curious about Static. Walking across carpet on a dry winter day. Getting a static shock with a floppy in your hand. I think they even sold anti static sprays and stuff back in the day.
What should you do with Gary? Feed it rabbit from Sainsbury's. (Chas and Dave reference) "You got more rabbit than Sainsbury's. Why don't you give it a rest?" (The song for those not in the know...)
I had a Sony CRT back in the day that used to degauss every time you turned it on. I had a C64 set up on it at one point and forgot I left a game (on cassette) on top of it once when turning it on. It never loaded again.
I keep wondering if this would have turned out different if the slider part was metal instead of plastic? I suspect the issues many had might have been caused by the metal part being magnetized.
Fun fact courtesy of the resplendent PixelMusement: When using the weaker magnet you were technically damaging the data, but only temporarily. The weaker magnet lacks the strength to permanently realign the oxide particles in the short term, so when the magnetic force is removed the particles naturally go back to how they want to be. A strong magnetic force is necessary to realign the particles permanently and instantly and the weaker that magnetic force gets the longer it needs to be sustained to permanently realign the particles.
@7:54 LOL!@"Silly twonk"
All I can say is don't put your magnetic media in your motorcycle's magnetic tank bag because bad things WILL happen.
What if u leave a floppy on ur top/back of ur CRT monitor for a while or on top PC speakinr
Try and remove the permanent marker with some alcohol, or other suitable subtances and try re-foramtting.
Peter, don't you mean "in the long term" ?
Always wondered about this! Fun tests to watch :)
LGR this comment is not odd, forgoten and obsolete.
Your my favorite channel hello LGR
A pleasure to have you here as always LGR
Nostalgia Nerd wonder when you two are gonna make a colab video.
one of my fav channels, commenting on anotherone of my fave channels :)
Why are you trying to corrupt me??? :D
YOU ARE ALREADY CORRUPTED.
Nostalgia Nerd He's not Peter Molyneux!
Lewd
He's a Bad Influence! Tonight on ITV
The Orokin tower needs minions
Hey All, I have a tale of floppy disk + magnets of my own, wanna read it?
It's a bit long so make yourselves comfortable...
Are you ready? Then I'll begin:
Back in 1988(ish) when i had my first Spectrum +3, one of my diskettes got corrupted thanks to a faulty fridge, which sent spikes out on the mains every time it started. Now, as you may know, the +3 uses 3-inch floppies, but i can't say for sure if this has any bearing on what happened after.
Either way, the disk didn't work at all, in fact i couldn't even format it. This was quite bad, since those 3" disk were rather expensive, and i was broke, so i didn't want to just throw it out.
What does one do in such a situation? Well, after some thought, i took a small loudspeaker with a ferrite magnet and took it apart, then broke the magnet in two chunks, which i then wrapped in tissue paper, and put both chunks in contact with the disk surface, one chunk on each side of the disk, while rotating the disk by hand. This procedure was meant to hopefully destroy the formatting so that i could reuse the disk. However, this had no effect whatsoever, the disk was still unusable.
It was then time to bring out the "big guns", i decided, and took a small mains tranformer apart by removing the yoke that normally completes the magnetic circuit of the transformer. I then proceeded to move the thusly modified trafo in circles on both sides of the floppy. The magnetic field from the trafo was so strong that the aluminum shotter made a rather loud rattlinig noise due to eddy currents.
Alas, this had no effect either, so i was on the verge of giving up, but i then remembered that i had recently typed in a File unerase program from a listing in Your Sinclair. I therefore disassembled the machine code, and was able to modify it into a very primitive sort of Disc Doctor program, just to see WTH was going on on my floppy disk.
As it turned out, the very first byte of the "Disk Signature" on the diskette had been changed, and after a further modification of my Disc Doc program to enable it to write back to disk, i restored the Disk Signature to its correct value, and Lo! and Behold, the entire contents of the disk was back as it had been before the corruption took place.
Cheers from Denmark, and thanks for reading my story.
BertyFromDK what disk signature? Do floppy disk have a subchannel of some sort? I though all the hardware configuration was done with the holes in the plastic casing.
Hi Laharl Krichevskoy
No, there is no subchannel, and all synchronisation is indeed done via the hole, so let me try to explain:
When the Spectrum +3 was designed by Amstrad, who at that point had bought the rights to the Spectrum brand from Clive Sinclair, they used virtually the same disk format as had previously been used on their own line of PCW wordprocessing computers.
This disk format includes the aforementioned disk signature, in the form of the text string "PLUS3DOS" which is placed in the beginning of sector 0. On Amstrad's other computers of the time, the PCW line, and the CPC line, similar formats were used, with the disk signature reflecting which machine a given diskette had been formatted on.
Because of the similarity between these formats, at least the Spectrum +3 was able to read and write to the other types, but not format them.
Anyway, becuase the signature on the disk in my tale had been corrupted, my +3 was unable to do anything with the disk - it couldn't even reformat the disk!
It was only after i had altered the unerase program that i had typed in from a magazine listing, and turned it into a sort of primitive disk doctor, that i was able to see, and then restore, the damage that had occurred.
Please feel free to ask more questions if my explanation is unclear. :)
Greetings from Denmark.
P.S. The reason all these computers, the +3, the CPC range, and the PCW range, had similar formats was because it enabled them to run CP/M, the old 8-bit operating system that was quite popular back in the late 70's and early 80's. CP/M even came bundled with the PCW machines, and the CPC6128/CPC664, but for the CPC464* and the +3 it had to be bought separately.
*The CPC464 didn't have a built-in disk drive, so an external drive had to be purchased in order to use disk software on that machine.
Thanks to everyone who gave my tale a thumbs-up, and a special thanks to Peter for the heart! :D
There is a big difference in the kind of disks - original and high resolution. The latter one uses high coersive force magnetic material. But both of them could be reset by a Radio Shack Tape Cassette Eraser, as I found. In fact, I had more than once floppy disks that could not be read, nor reformatted - until I treated them with the Tape Cassette Eraser. No problem formatting after that.
5.25” floppies were easier also because the housing material is thin. On the 3.5” hard case disks you don’t get as close to the magnetic material, so the shape of the magnetic (AC ) field might need to be taken into account.
In high school we had BBC's and mostly BBC branded monitors. When you switched the screens off, they created a spectacular amount of static.
You could stick things to the screen with the static...things like 5 1/4" floppies. Turned out to be quite effective at ruining peoples work.
...children are awful :)
Most crt's did that and I used to stick pieces of paper to a television when I was a kid, and it could also pull your hair up like a charged balloon. The downside was dust attraction.
Most CRT monitors have an electromagnetic degaussing coil that activates when they are first plugged into the wall...the degauss circuit probably erased the disk.
I swear I've owned disks that, by the time I've taken them out my mate's PC and put them in mine, they've become corrupt. And then there was the school floppy that went through the washing machine in my shirt pocket, which still works.
James Grimwood the big thing is that different disk drives can be misaligned from each other, so it's probably not that the disk was "corrupted" but rather that your drive just couldn't read disks your friend's drive wrote.
Probably, also we did used to buy the suspiciously cheap packets of disks from the local market. That being the local market that sold "shareware" that looked like it'd come off the previous month's PC Format.
Yes i was confused by this too, some disks couldnt hold data over 1 week, while others lasted over 20 years... when i googled i found out that the older disks from the 80s and early 90s were MUCH better, and especially A brand ones from that time will keep their data for 30+ years, while newer floppys from the late 90s are generally expected to randomly lose data, sometimes within weeks, sometimes maybe a few years
One of the most frustrating things that ever happened to me was a pair of CD-R's where the backside came off within about a year of writing data onto them.
Haven't trusted them since.
100 year lifespan. Hah! Yeah right!
Floppy disks are a bit less predictable than that.
Though I'm contemplating getting a drive controller specifically made for archival purposes. It attempts to read the magnetic flux transitions directly, meaning it will read exactly what is on the disk, rather than trying to interpret it according to some specific logic, as most floppy drives do.
Amongst other things this lets you read disks formatted in weird ways, the actual contents of corrupted sectors (including those which were corrupted deliberately for 'copy protection' purposes), and the low level formatting information itself.
While it's primary purpose is creating reliable archival copies of disks no matter what kind of computer wrote them, nor what weird formatting and data tricks it might be using to try and prevent it being copied properly, I have a feeling the nature of how it works is likely to do a much better job reading corrupted disks too.
If nothing else, a disk image of the low level flux transitions would be a much better starting point for data reconstruction than what a typical disk drive gives you.
You'd have a pretty reliable indication of any corruption both in the data, and the formatting of the disk, and that couldn't hurt.
Depending on the accuracy, since it's measuring flux transitions you might also get some sense of any data that was partially overwritten, since it may mostly be in one state, but contain a few weird elements that indicate other states it's been in...
Short of using an electron microscope you're probably not getting a better result than that. XD
Yeah cheap CDRs have the same type of problem, I think there is no real reliable backup storage media to be found, they can all just go "poof" randomly... especially after 10+ years. The only real reliable way would probably be to store it on at least 3 different media, and you will have to check all 3 every year, once 1 fails make a new one.... wich sucks. Im looking for a single storage device that will hold data for 30+ years, wich you can just store in a closet without having to ever look at it!
Guess I'll go stick some floppy disks on the fridge to freak the family out. Whether they'll be more concerned about the data on it or the fact that I still have floppy disks I don't know.
EmberFool yep even better, now you can stick trumps floppy disk on your fridge for a week tosee if he will make up his mind whether or not.
EmberFool lollll, best comment
DON'T REMOVE *DATA* ON FLOPPIES
A more "cientific" way to determine if data corruption took place you can get an md5 hash on the disk, even the most slight change in the data will result totally different, the only problem is that not so interesting and graphic as trying to load paperboy :-)
image the entire disk and md5sum/shasum or even hex diff compare to the original image since it's only 1.44Mb.
As it stands this test is a method failure on a lot of levels.
The way you waft the horseshoe magnet around at the beginning reminds me of the Look Around You experiments :D
Write that down in your copybook now.
6:59 Gary... by Sainsbury’s
Your frame freeze skills are impeccable sir.
Nostalgia Nerd why thank you, my uncle is also named Gary so it seemed like fate
Oh, I am late...
I was replaying that part for like 1 minute trying to pause at the right time XD
Factory OC ikr lol
Thanks for clearing that up, Pete! :) Never had the guts to try that! Awesome video!
Cheers!
Cool! I think a checksum would have been a good way to check for errors though
You had it out for Gary from the beginning, you monster.
Magnets vs Harddrives would be more spectacular. My favorite was always when people put their magnetic iPad cover on their laptops pre SSD drives!
While I'm sure the contents are just fine, it still irks me whenever I see kitchen magnets on a PC case. They may not be doing any harm, but it's just good practice not to tempt the photons.
I was almost going to purchase one of those NZXT puck magnets for my headphones to attach to my case.
Shouldn't be much of a problem with a modern solid-state everything system.
Photons??????
If you have to use a magnet, use the rubber lodestone business card sheet magnets...they aren't a very high flux level and are unlikely to cause problems.
This reminds me of the early 90s when I worked as a junior mainframe operator one of my jobs was tape storage, and I was in charge of a small room with a bulk tape eraser in the center, also we had the coolest robot tape archive machine too.
I broke Disk 1 of Project X on the Amiga by putting my phone on it for by accident. it was there for several hours. I also knackered my laptop's HDD by accidently placing one of those magnetic dishes on my laptop right over where the HDD was. I realised what I was doing just as I felt the dish pull downwards. Ever heard a HDD disc scream in pain? I had to replace it.
Yeah, hdds scream when the disk touches the heads...
LaRRy BaRRy and .. GaRy .. wat.
Ma homeys.
Gary got the shaft
Don't do my boy Gary dirty like that...
cubs0110 up the Gary?
cubs0110 Gary deserves it.
Anyone who has ever opened a hard drive knows there's incredibly strong magnets which actuate the arm. It was an interesting test, and I think it would have been a bit more interesting if a hash of the data had been performed to make sure every single byte was still intact. But I was somewhat confident that the more casual magnet contact early on would have been okay.
Back in the 80's I worked for a Disk Manufacturer. We used to use a bulk eraser to clean disks after testing. Basically the disk passed through a gap between 2 metal plates filled with magnets. The varying filed effectively erased everything on the disks. Could be done at high speed as well. Till we started formatting every disk the disk bulk erasure was part of the manufacturing process.
Gary always makes me think of Only Fools and Horses.
The problem with putting disks on the monitor will be when you turn it on and it degauses. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degaussing
Also, CRTs rely on electromagnets.
Those magnets guide the electron beam and are around the thin end of the tube, deep inside the monitor (and they are not that strong). Since magnetic force falls off quadratically, they cannot affect anything, Degaussing on the other hand energizes a coil near the screen, and pretty violently. So degaussing may have a small chance of flipping a bit on the disk while guiding coils do not.
When I was growing up, we used a 13" Magnavox television as a color monitor for our Apple IIc. If you left a disk on top of it and powered the television up, the degaussing coil would corrupt data on the disk basically every time. Compared to computer monitors, those small TVs had very little room between the edge of the CRT where the degaussing coil lived and the top of the plastic case. I'm sure that was responsible for a lot of floppy disk deaths in the 80s.
Oh how I miss degaussing my screens, and that weird purple discolouration that'd occur if you put your speakers too close.
In my experience, one thing sure to corrupt a disk is simply keeping them in a draw for 10 years.
Fantastic. Not only do i share the same name as a resident evil character, i have the same name as a floppy. Poor Barry.
The quality of the disc matters as well. I found in the early 90s that if I took some floppies on a train with me, and left them in a sports bag in the overhead shelf, the good discs (BASF, Maxell etc) would be fine. But some cheap Chinese discs I had bought in bulk, which were absolutely fine otherwise, would be partially or sometimes completely wiped in the same conditions - but if i kept them in my coat pocket, they were fine. I found the same as you; a corrupted disc would reformat and continue operating just fine. These cheaper discs must have recorded a more marginal signal, and the magnetism of the overhead electric line in the train just enough to wipe them.
Here's another twist and I swear it's true. When I was kid, me and my brother played a game on the Amiga called Wolfpack, or we tried to play it and it sucked so much we decided to destroy it with a magnet. Instead of destroying it, it kinda got permanent, at least at the time, because afterwards we could not actually initialize (format) the disk, because when we attempted to do so it would fail and the game would just keep working.
The floppy issue I had was not with magnets or markers, but condensation. I wanted to sell my Amiga 500 and I was told to put it in the extension of our house, which was prone to dampness, and after a while, any floppies I put into the A500 were practically erased by microscopic water droplets, which was infuriating when I was trying to demonstrate the machine to potential buyers. Luckily, I was able to relocate the Amiga, eventually sell it and use the money to buy Doom 2 on CD-ROM.
@"Nostalgia Nerd"
You could have tried quickly wiggling the weaker magnet against the floppy. That might have been more effective than just putting it against it or moving it in circles.
Also, the bit about putting them agains the screen may be related to the degaussing coil, which does generate a strong oscilating magnetic field, that "dissolves" the undesired magnetization of the screen.
This is not a very accurate experiment.
If a bit is filpped, BMP will most likely have a single pixel changed - it may be quite hard to spot. However, that same bit can completely ruin any compressed data.
Furthermore, windows may cache thumbnails (in files "thumbs.db") and only reads those, not the images themselves, unless you actually open one. The problem with this is that thumbnail file is tiny, so only a small portion of disk surface is tested.
You should have filled the disks entirely and did a CRC check (uncompressing a ZIP does that too).
98 didn't use Thumbs.db if I recall correctly. That came about in the Windows NT releases.
The individual sectors on a disk are already CRC protected on a hardware level (the controller creates and checks it), so you lose either 512 byte or nothing.
This is the best unscientific disk magnet video ever.
Precisely drawing on your floppies can defeat certain types of copy protection, like the ones where the original puts a physical hole in the plastic. The software would try to write data to the sector, and when read back, get all 0s. On an "undamaged" copy, the data read back would be whatever was written, and the software would then detect the piracy.
Similar techniques were later used on CDs/DVDs, notably the PlayStation "wobble groove"
Does Windows 98 cache preview images on non-permanent media like floppys? Was wondering that the whole time because the previews seemed to load pretty quick sometimes
yes, I think it's thumbs.db
Thumbs.db was added later in NT 5 and higher. The original IE installation with 98 didn't do this, iirc - it read the files every time for a preview.
You can see the "Generating preview" text before the preview image displayed. I assume he just cut footage for time. No need to show that tedious slow task of opening each file.
It looks like a lot of those images were the tiny tiled bitmaps that were no bigger than 64x64 at the very most.
If you're unsure an F5 refresh will force it to reread
When I was in high school I was an aide to the school computer tech we had tons of 98 boot desks stuck to the side of our computers with magnets they worked fine every time but we always got odd locks from it 🤣
I once tried to build a floppy eraser. That is a rather strong electromagnet running on AC mains. I ran a check on the test diskette by some Norton utility (I think) that gave a graphic overview of the diskettes condition. To blobs marked the poles of the magnet. The rest was just fine. Then I tried with a "degausser" built for tape recorders. The pile of floppies began humming and all content was gone. I did not try reformatting, it was some data that were to be discarded - safely.
When I had to dispose of some magnetic tapes that just might contain something, I cut them up with a saw. I took a while and was quite funny. That was old large spools of tape.
I actually use a neodymium magnet to "demagnetize" double-density 5.25in floppy disks before formatting and writing to them in high-density drives, since it improves the chances of them working in older double-density drives by clearing out the garbage data that would otherwise confuse the wider read head on the older drive. It works quite well actually.
6:58 So...what blipvert were you trying to inflict upon us? (I couldn't pause at the right time to see what it was).
**EDIT** Hah! Nope, I feel no urge to go to Sainsburys to check out their Gary range.
I noticed that too lol max headroom anyone?
Yay! Someone got my Max headroom reference! I can now get on with my day.
Try this with a VHS cassette! The tale of someone walking up and down all the aisles in blockbuster video with an earth magnet in their pocket, destroying all the movies in the store.... even all the copies of Weekend at Burnie's 2 :)
Used to fly into Belfast City Airport very regularly for work. This was during the troubles. Every 3.5' disc I had would be blanked when they went through xray scanner at the airport. Ended up having to post discs ahead of visit.
Ouch at those wipe marks on the floppy where the drive head wiped off the paint marker! Time for a new floppy drive.
on win98 era my floppies kept getting corrupt for no apparent reason. eventually ifound out that it was the floppy drive that was corrupting them. THAT BASTARD. *SOB* and now that i 've got this out of my system i'll mourn for garry if you'll excuse me >8'((
I'm surprised how much magnet these disks could take here. When we were kids, we did intentionally corrupt some unimportant 3.5" floppies with normal household magnets. Though we did slide that protective cover of a disk a side, so that magnet was touching actual disk surface and we kept it there for a good while.
Leaving disks attached to refrigerator by magnet overnight is my new hobby
U have very high quality floppies. I remember in early 2000's my diskettes can be destroyed unformatable with the weakest magnet.
Hey Nostalgia Nerd! I always though the 3.5 inch floppies are called stiffies in the UK. I deeply remember a day when a UK student circa year 2000 approched me in a computer lab asking if I have a stiffy... Deeply embarising moment... It was in Los Angeles...
You can get the sticky / sticker residue off surfaces (such as CD , DVD cases & those raggedy-ass looking 3.5" floppies) with orange oil - it's dirt cheap and should be available from your local supermarket in the cleaning section.
About 13 years ago, I unthinkingly placed a little speaker on my crowded desk on top of an external usb hard drive. It sat there for a day or 2 before I noticed that the hard drive wasn't showing up anymore and I had to go back to Disk Manager and reinitialize my now blank 1TB disk.
I did something similar with a normal magnet back in the days we mostly used 5 1/4" and like you I found that there was no data corruption. And like you I did not take this to mean that using storing magnets and floppies together is okay.
Some peoples say you should not use magnetized screwdrivers to work on a computer or more precisely its hard disk, I myself never had any problem. How about giving this video a sequel that use a hard disk insted of a floppy?
Hidden
Sainsbury's
endorsement.
If anybody is wondering what that single frame at 6:58 was. I can tell you it is an ad for 'GARY by Sainsbury's'
This video was worth it just for the Barry Scott cameo!
Horshoe magnet can easily corrupt the disk only if you put the floppy betweet the north and south pole. The reason it didnt do anything on the disk is because you didnt test it. Data saves in the disk by applying magnetism. North on top and south on bottom for 1, and south on top and north on bottom for 0.
Try older, bigger floppies like 5.25" and 8.5". ;)
And tapes too, if we are going for completeness may as well go all in. I'm sure he can dig up a C15 from some long forgotten corner.
RIP Gary
??? - 2018
You will be missed. :'(
perm marker ... sounds like the hole-in-platter copy-protection I recently learned about. (this copy protection tried to write to a specific sector that was 'situated' in the aforementioned hole and would perform an insta-kill on level 3 if it succeeded.)
That's... one of the funniest intro sequences I've seen in a while... XD
Hey how did you 3-D print a save button
i've lost floppies just walking 5 steps across a room. brand new floppies, freshly formatted.
Nostalgia Nerd I´m not a native english speaker, but I try: The magnetic "range" of neodymium is always lower than equally strong Ferro magnets. Something to consider when comparing the "length". :) Why this is, I can´t say.
Gary by Sainsbury's
6:58
That alnico magnet looks like a cartoon caricature of a magnet. I don't think I've ever seen one that actually looks like that. :-)
I remember being so scared of magnets near my discs also in the 90s in the UK there was a craze for ionizers and I was also really worried about ionisers near the discs
Permanent markers usually have some solvent so the ink doesn't dry inside, which probably damaged the magnetic coating when you rubbed it in.
Brilliant! Loved it. Next stop on the magnetic media don'ts: X-Rays!
When I was in middle school I had to use floppies to carry data for one of my classes and they kept getting erased until I started carrying them in a shielded case in my pocket instead of just a plastic one.
when you are running out of space on floppy, shake it a bit so data moves more together and free up some space. (I've seen this in one old czech computer magazine}
I've always wondered this. Thanks for the experiment!
Would be neat to fill one entirely with a large uncompressed image and be able to see the damage. Though if the header of the file or the disks formatting gets messed up it wouldn't work, you can copy paste the header back into the file, so if you can get the data off of a floppy without the formatting, then it might be doable.
I would like to see Terry the CRT monitor in a future episode. I love this kind of destructive stuff!
Cool vid Mr Wizard! Fun topic. Thanks
slowed it down to the slowest setting to see the subliminal joke, turned "what do we do with you gary" into the most terrifying thing ever....
i put a floppy on a magnetic stirrer back in the late 80s or so - which has a HUGE magnetic flux - you could BARELY pry the thing off of it - the last test was 20 minutes on the stirrer (alternating magnetic field of course) and you could read and copy the floppy JUST FINE
I think the phrase you're searching for is: "Yeah bitch.... magnets"
The new Psytronic releases for the c64 state to "Keep your disk away from magnetic fields (and I don't mean the Jean-Michel Jarre album) ..."
we'll start with "larry" *Hearing his greeting in the back groud* I am in tears. Why hurt larry, he's done nothing wrong!
It always amazed me how paranoid people were about using a small fridge magnet to hold a note to the side of a computer case. You couldn't convince them that it would have no effect on the data on their drives.
You will hear tell of people sticking floppy diskettes to things with magnets and damaging their data, and many of these are true. This is because the oldest floppy diskette (and full-size 8" jobs) formulations weren't as magnetically strong and were easily disrupted. The formulations used in 1.2, 1.44, 2.4 & 2.88 MByte floppies are strong enough that common magnets won't hurt them, but strong electromagnets, large magnets, and rapidly oscillating magnetic fields (like those generated by certain mechanical telephone bells) can injure them.
what's the name of the retro electronic song you used in the background?
When I started in 1994 I was afraid to get mine anywhere near my speakers even. Over time I stopped worrying. Time is the worst enemy.
This was weirdly quite *fun* to watch!
it takes 200 gauss to erase a floppy and about 15.000 to erase a hard disk. any old degausser will work. the reason disks can be erased near a monitor is largely due to the automatic degaussing coil placed around the CRT.
1:25 Who else felt the pain of erasing old data and programs? They might be useful in future
That was really interesting! Nice video.
Another great video.
Those Sharpies are great. Did you too get them from Poundland?
I have always been curious about Static. Walking across carpet on a dry winter day. Getting a static shock with a floppy in your hand. I think they even sold anti static sprays and stuff back in the day.
Clips of Barry Scott = massive win
6:58 what is that 1 frame picture i can't pause on? :'(
What should you do with Gary? Feed it rabbit from Sainsbury's. (Chas and Dave reference)
"You got more rabbit than Sainsbury's. Why don't you give it a rest?" (The song for those not in the know...)
Looking at the streaks through the paint, are you sure you didn't also wreck your disc heads?
this has to be the first time I saw a magnet looking like this that isnt comic.
I had a Sony CRT back in the day that used to degauss every time you turned it on. I had a C64 set up on it at one point and forgot I left a game (on cassette) on top of it once when turning it on. It never loaded again.
I remember keeping mine as far away from my M-Tron Lego sets as possible.
I didn't expect Guru Larry to show up here LOL
I keep wondering if this would have turned out different if the slider part was metal instead of plastic? I suspect the issues many had might have been caused by the metal part being magnetized.
Soooo nerdy.... well done
I have had a CRT monitor nuke a floppy disk before. Not all of them do it as most are shilded. It is the unshilded ones that can do it.
Now try it with some old harddrives. CHAOS!
Ha love the Gary by Sainsbury’s flashup. Lol
4:22 Pictures in the preview are corrupted.
>1 kg of force
1 kg of mass, ~10 Newtons
>neo dayumnium
neoDYMium