Advice on malfunctioning floppy drives??

[redhawk]

I've been going through my old collection of floppy disks looking for backup files I used to have stored on my old Ultrix account at University.
Everything was going fine until Windows wanted to format every disk I inserted.
I thought hmm odd and tried a previous floppy I had known to be good and that too was unreadable.
I reboot Windows XP, removing and reinstall the floppy controller but to no avail the drive was screwed.

So I fired up my spare PC and check again, the disk was perfectly fine as was the previous disks that had been rejected.
I continued to recheck my floppies again until I came to an old low density disk and bang the floppy drive in my spare PC decided to give up the ghost too.

Now I'm really puzzled here I've been using floppy disk drives for many years and I have never encounter a problem quite like this.
Usually its my floppy disks that get trashed in dodgy poorly maintained University / College computers and never the disk drive itself getting trashed from the disk.
I suspect the heads could be contaminated with magnetic deposits but I have to be honest I would have expect bad track 0, sector errors or re-reads (the usually kicking noise) but it's dead silent.
I did manage to get one of my other low density disks to read once but after a while that too became unreadable.

Has anyone encounter a problem like this??

Would a disk cleaner like this one - http://www.amazon.co.uk//dp/B005ERQGFM/ restore my floppy drives back to good health??

Richard S.

[Burngate]

That cleaner could help - it's only solvent, doesn't seem to be abrasive, and won't break the bank.

An alternative is to get a USB floppy drive - eg
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Proxima-Direct% ... isc+drives
though I gather they're not supported on Win8

It could easily be that old discs - and low density ones are likely to be the oldest - are degrading, shedding oxide
I've no idea what spraying with isopropanol would do to a disc - would it just remove loose oxide, or would it remove all the oxide?

[mikerr]

I went though this with many of my old amiga disks

The problem is that floppy disk read head is always in physical contact with the disk (unlike a cd or hard disk)
the head brushes/scrapes across the surface of the disk.
The disk surface also contains lubricant, which dries out over a decade or two, and the oxide layer becomes brittle

When the surface degrades, every spin is wearing the surface down,
putting oxide dust/particles everywhere and on the heads.

Once its on the heads, it will then grind away at other disks too.

So clean the heads, with a cottonbud soaked in alcohol, or a cleaning disk,
You can clean the disks too with a cottonbud (q-tip for the merkins).

[GTR2Fan]

+1 to the above post.

I went through all of this about 5 years ago and ended up binning all 50+ of my used floppies. I do still have 30 3.5" floppies in factory-sealed boxes of 10 in the hope that they may stay fresh enough to use some day if the need arises. I'm not depending on it though.