User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 1:26 pm

I thought it might be a good idea to open up a topic about your experiences with your old Amiga disks. Some of these disks are now close to 30 years old.

How do they fare?

What do you do to save them?

Actually I am not sure why but I, as well as other industry gurus, have found that Amiga disks and 3.5" disks in general did not fare so well with time. I have far, far more disks on Amiga (I have over 1000) that have gone bad since going into storage in the late 90's. I mean a lot of disks have errors on them. I can format said disks and they will work fine so I am not sure what the cause is other then some disks just lose it after a while.

Now compare that to 5.25" C64 (and others) disks that I have (over 2000) and I have had very few go bad even ones going back to VIC-20 days with a date I put on them in 1982! Still work perfectly. The ones that did seem to go bad were certain makes of 3M (SSDD) and Centron (SSDD) which I can see from the disk that they were likely made by 3M. These disks showed black spots on the surface that don't really come off. It could be mold or it could be oxidation.

That being said I have made it a habit to test my old disks and I have found some that have worked only after cleaning the disk surface with Isopropyl alcohol and a Qtip. It is a pain but it can mean the difference between complete data loss and recovering files.

One thing that is critical to do when you use old disks is to clean your drive head often. This is more critical for 5.25" drives but 3.5" drive heads get dirty too.

For Amiga you could disassemble the top case to get to the drives and then use a little Isopropyl (90%+) alcohol and moisten a Qtip and swab both the upper and lower head gently. Do not apply too much pressure and do not lift the top head out of the way or you may damage it. They have a little bit of play but if you don't know what how to identify how much play it is best not to touch it. The same process is for the Commodore 5.25 drives.

You can sometimes see gunk on the head. If that procedure is too much for you, you can still buy both 5.25" and 3.5" disk head cleaner kits.

A couple notes: 1. Don't saturate the head with alcohol. Just moisten the swab to get just enough to clean it. Same with the Cleaning disk it will usually tell you only a drop or two of solution. 2. Some places use Rubbing Alcohol and Isopropyl alcohol interchangeably. They are not always the same, look at the ingredients if you are uncertain. I always stick with 90% or greater Isopropyl.

So what tools do you use to transfer disks or Utilities to check disks?
I use various tools on Amiga side, like TransADF.
PC/Amiga side I like Amiga Explorer. But I also have used a KryoFlux and something I like better the SuperCard Pro
For checking disks I use X-Copy scandisk. This will report any errors it finds. But do try it on multiple drives as some older drives seem to have a hard time so make sure the heads are clean. I have a newly made external drive that reads disks very well. It can show no errors on a disk and copy it fine when one of my older Amiga drives will see errors. There is also a couple of utilities for recovering disk errors. I can't think of the names off hand but look on Aminet and under disk utilities.

What have you found with your old disk collections?

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 1:54 pm

https://youtu.be/qrt1plYhZ7c

It's not often someone gives me the chance to whore my own videos so what the hell? :D - Ummm... That video is for nostalgia purposes... I am a "professional", do not attempt to do what you see in this program...

hahha, I'll write another reply answering in a few hours, but I thought people might get a kick out of that video... I wrote about it on here somewhere as well...

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 2:19 pm

Actually I am not sure why but I, as well as other industry gurus, have found that Amiga disks and 3.5" disks in general did not fare so well with time.
It's funny you say that - I've had a very similar experience. I have some ancient C64 5.25" disks and and they just never seem to go bad. Not unless you really try to damage them. I have stacks of Amiga disks that have read errors (and I've thrown even more away).

Now, I should also point out that most of the errors I encountered were when I was using my NOS "Amiga Technologies" 1200. I've read that those floppy drives had issues. So, of course, now I regret having tossed some of my stuff because I really should re-try reading some.

I've got a few that I didn't have the heart to throw away because I was certain it was more an AGA and/or AT floppy issue.

I find kryoflux way more hassle than it is worth, personally. I used that to crunch an original ADF for the copy of A Mind Forever Voyaging, which I have. I made a pristine copy for TOSEC and they wanted me to use kryoflux to do it. No one seemed to have a copy of this [important] game so I was happy to do it. But I don't think I'd ever go that route for my own collection. I'd rather just make ADFs and store them somewhere. Like... here! 8-)

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Feb 08, 2017 2:28 pm

Yeah I agree with you on the KryoFlux route. I have found that SuperCard Pro, even though it is also a flux copier it is a copier and can make C64 disk images as well as Amiga ADF out of the box. No command line needed it has a program written for windows, VB6 IIRC.

@Shot97,

I will check out the video when I get home sounds interesting. I don't see that as spamming so carry on. :)





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