From Jason Scott
I cannot stress enough how so many people sitting on disks (sealed even) are going to be shocked that they simply do NOT WORK anymore…..
Archiveteam.org also has great resources on the whole floppy debacle… And I’ve mentioned this before.
About 4 years ago, I found the time to go through about 1/2 of my C64 floppies from the 80’s, and migrate their data into my “periodically transfer to fresh media” archive set. Although there were a lot of errors, I was surprised at how many disks still read fine. I guess I need to get on the ball about archiving the other 1/2!
Seriously, I just pulled up some new 1.44mbs I formatted a year ago and they failed! To be fair, sometimes they could possibly read but never will because you formatted on a drive that head its heads out of alignment.
:S