[Discuss] Retrieving old 3.5 inch floppy disk data

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2019-01-28 12:19-0700 RICHARD BODY wrote:

[...]
> It's anybody's
> guess if my reasoning then permits retrieval now. MSDOS was probably safe, 1.44MB floppies
> were maybe a decade old, and guessing what medium would endure wasn't a sure bet.

The other assumption is that modern floppy drives will actually be
reliable.  The one I bought in 1996 for my first PC was rock solid and
could read virtually any floppy, but the one I bought 4 years later
for my second PC was much less reliable; it often could not read a
floppy that it had written itself while the first drive could read
that floppy without issues.  So that second one was probably just a
lemon and not illustrative of any industry trends over that short a
time span, but it did illustrate that the floppy drive manufacturers
even then did not necessarily produce a reliable floppy drive.  So
fast forward two decades later with a much smaller niche market for
floppy drives, and I think the chances for unreliability are much
higher.  So it will be interesting to see how that works out, i.e.,
whether you can reliably write and read new floppy media on *any OS*
with that drive.

By the way, I think it is good that you are trying to resurrect your
floppy data with a USB drive rather than some expansion card.  Because
my guess (simply from fewer pins where something could go wrong) is
there is less chance for USB hardware to screw up your computer
compared to expansion cards.

The reason I brought this topic up is I recently made the mistake of
buying (via newegg) a ~$20 PCIe expansion card to give my new computer
ESATA capability.  But Mother Computers rightly advised not to even
bother installing that PCIe card in the computer because the
manufacturing job on that expansion card was so bad.  They showed me
all the obviously bad soldering that occurred on that card (solder
drips getting right into the PCIe pins that were supposed to connect
the card with my computer).  Because of those obvious defects they
felt there was a significant chance that card would burn out my
Motherboard, and I had to agree with them.  The amount of money was so
small I didn't even bother trying to get a refund from newegg, but
from an environmental perspective I really hated to create unnecessary
e-trash with that buy.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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