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Degausing old floppy disks?

If you want to check what's on the disk after the pass with the bulk eraser, get some Kyread and have a look. It will be an expensive proposition, however--Kyread isn't cheap.
 
MIcron-sized pyrolytic iron in a fast-evaporating carrier (ether, I think); let's you see magnetic patterns. Essential if you do a lot of tape work. Here's a shot of a segment of 7 track tape.
wKuTXZH.jpg
 
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Looks a bit like a funky dna test. I was looking here - Are you supposed to visually decipher 0 and 1 and manually create a track or do it with a "viewer" or what?
 
Mostly to see what you've got and what condition it's in. I suppose you might be able to read very low (e.g.200 fci) tapes optically. The photo that I took above was done through an inspection microscope. It told me that I was dealing with a digital 7 track tape, as opposed to either an 9 track digital tape or an instrumentation tape. The one in the photo, I believe was 800 bpi.
 
Chuck(G) said:
o see what you've got and what condition it's in.
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Interesting quote that is oddly relevant to me at the moment. Ordered a Canon scanner this morning. No kidding, it arrived this afternoon. Light as a feather. Installed like a charm. Lots of good features (that I already knew about).

Just a small problem:

Every single scan, regardless of setting, regardless of every freaking reasonable attempt to fix it had this wonderful vertical line.....don't even think about something on the glass, I looked with a loupe and cleaned it anyways. About the only thing I didn't do was try the degausser on it :)

Bad Scanner IMG_20240317_0015.jpg
Maybe it has a bad bit problem in optical RAM (I have no idea about that at all). It is just not something you want in a scanner. Four hours later, it is packed back up. Got the return paperwork and told them to send me another one, which should come in a couple of days. I have a month to return the bad one and I will do it Friday.

It's not over with yet, but I have to say that Amazon is indifferent to this kind of thing. They just ask you what you want - refund or replacement.
 
Here is a PDF scan of the RS Magnetic Bulk Tape Eraser, 44-210, instructions.
 

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  • RS44_210 Magnetic bulk tape eraser-1.pdf
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High-density floppy disks, as well as chrome and metal formulation audio and videotapes, will require longer to fully erase than what the manual recommends. I discovered that it takes quite a while to completely erase a Metal Evaporated MiniDV videotape:

 
Can this method be done with zip disks?

Im going through my shelves of things doing spring cleaning and have all my zip disks and drives out. I have 3 disks that wont even read. They were stored in a good environment so would the realistic tape eraser be a good idea or catastrophically bad? I have no idea the specific formatting the zip disks need.
 
I was afraid of that. So if the iomegaware is showing (no disk inserted) for these disks, that embedded formatting is most likely corrupt and thats it then?
 
I know I was relying on Guest.exe in DOS but having no luck so I found an iomegaware CD I still had and thought it was worth a shot.
 
VERAULT said:
I was afraid of that. So if the iomegaware is showing (no disk inserted) for these disks, that embedded formatting is most likely corrupt and thats it then?
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If the disk isn't torn, it could simply have all 4 spare tracks used to replace damaged sectors. Why Iomega chose to shut down all access to the disk instead of allowing read only access is a mystery. IIUC, Iomega kept drives internally that could reset sectors so some disks could have been recovered. Without the special drive or someone managing to clone the drive, the disk will never be used again.
 
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