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is there a way to revitalize NOS diskettes?

billdeg

billdeg

Technician
Joined
Nov 18, 2003
Messages
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Location
Landenberg, PA USA
Let's say you have a box of diskettes still in their shrink wrap. You open the disks and the first one does not work. Is there anything you can do to a diskette to re-vitalize it before use? Would baking in an oven at 100+ degrees for a minute or two (before you melt the plastic) do anything useful? I am curious if anyone has a way to prep NOS diskettes that have been sitting for 20 years before use.
 
Hmm, do the other 9 work? You and I both know that they only sample a small number of production disks. Could have been defective for last 20 years, very hard to know.
 
this is just a hypothetical question.

Personally I just throw away bad disks, and if three or four from a box in a row are bad, I usually chuck the entire box into my bad disk bin. I have a good 499+ whatever diskettes in a box, that failed to load the intended sofware or did not return a directory. Once they fail for whatever reason, I separate them from the working disks so that I don't get them confused.
 
Diskettes fail for different reasons, therefore, no single solution will work in every case. If the adhesive used to stick the magnetic stuff onto the floppy thinggy fails, perhaps the oven trick might soften it again and prevent the stuff from flaking off (please excuse my technical language). My first suggestion would be to try a bulk eraser though.

--T
 
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I had one of those Radio Shack cassette tape demagnetizers for years. Of course, I threw it out during one of my moves. I just recently got to fork out good money to buy another one (from a different company this time)....

Anyway, I would bet running one of those over a NOS diskette might "perk it up" :cool: Would certainly get all those "magnetic domains" unaligned again.

(p.s. Guess I won't bid against you on that M100 in the cute case). I have 2 M100 sitting here already waiting for me to take the RAM out of them. Weird when you can buy the entire computer cheaper than the RAM in them. RAM goes into NEC 8201s, btw.
 
If the disk doesn't give off that dreadful "Screee, Scree" sound of bit-rotted disks, I wonder if simply passing a bulk-erase device over it/them might not serve to reallign/energise the domains. If you have some sort of bulk eraser, might be worth a try. I've found that generally the older disks were better made and do not toss them unthinkingly. They are after all simply plastic with a magnetic oxide coating. If the microbes associated with bit-rot haven't chemically changed them shouldn't they be ok ? The original manufacturers must have done some similar process originally. Any sources for the manufacturing of floppies ? Or is that some fading arcane art ?

I have a vested interest in this since I have a multitude of old 5.25s, some virginal, some populated with disposable data. Most more than 20 years old.

L.
 
Hey! The 088 man is NOT reading the 407 man's posts. I'm gonna pull his 026 vacuum tubes, yaaah.


Whoaaaa, I see the T man came through with the BULK idea before either of the 2 really ancient dudes. Proving GMTA.
 
I don't know if New Old Stock is such a good thing. I'd prefer new.

Even NOS is subject to aging, shrink wrap or not. If the magnetic particles come loose from the plastic because the binder used 20 years ago has aged, it is a loss. Even worse, because nobody ever got use out of the disks.
 
you'd think the film the disk are made of would have some anti-microbe protection. I know from my courses that X-Ray film does. ( granted, the media is completely different, but the base material doesn't seem too different, just thicker in x-ray)
 
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