Do 5-inch floppies lose data? NOPE.

[Cheb]

I had a bunch of 5-inch floppies staring at me from my shelf for more than a decade, mocking me with their inscrutable content. What treasures could they hold? I forgot [sounds of hair tearing]
Also, stupid me, misplacing my 5-inch drive (I uninstalled it to protect it from being clogged with dust!) to never be found again.
The mystery gnawing at me, I was at the point of shopping for a used 5-inch drive online when my friend took pity on me and lent me one.
After emptying my air can into it to banish herds of dust bunnies and applying WD-40 to the head movement mechanism and a *lengthy, frustrating process of trying to find a combination of a motherboard with a working controller (my 266 MHz fossil has burned out ports, sadly - my old foolishnes of disconnecting a LPT cable without turning the PC off) and an intact cable among many mangled ones, I finally got it working. Yay!

Those 4 read without a hitch (except WinXP requires disabling then re-enabling the drive in the Device manager to actually update the folder contents, why caching it argh - it would gleefully read "files" from a previous disk, in reality just random sectors), the multi-volume RAR archive unpacked fine -- voila, I have my university thesis from my graduation back in 2000

After TWENTY ONE YEARS they read without a hitch! Without losing a single bit!
Hell yeah!



The thesis itself is interesting: most parts are copy-pasted bullshit my supervisor simply gave me to copy while my contribution comes in the form of a Turbo Pascal program I developed that works analyzing noisy real world data from digitizing current in rail switch motors using a simple algorithm to gloss over pits from dirty brushes to restore the exponent they draw in a perfect world and thus measure their worthiness programmatically.

I was scratching my in-between-ears bone trying to figure what my Soviet-based Specialist degree corresponds to, but after some researching through the Net, it seems it's Master's degree in railroad teleautomation -- in a system that existed before adopting the Western standard of separating higher education into Bachelor and Master halves, there were only Specialists (5 year) - basically, bachelor + master with a single thesis defending in the end, with first 2 years dedicated to general sciences like higher math, physics, and so on, while specialization began from the third year with the lazy asses already weeded out. Ooooh, I forgot *so much*. Headdesk.
Never worked even close to my specialty, ended up being a php backend developer.

The vast majority of the programming work in the university was being made using these XT ripoffs in Turbo Pascal
(full sized: http://www.leningrad.su/museum/show_big.php?n=1435 )
The machine is cheap crap but they had it in NUMBERS. many, many, MANY labs throughout all the university buildings full of these.
Advice to modern user: if you are so foolish to turn it off before executing park.com first, the hard drive heads could become welded to the disk. You can revive it, though, by opening the hard drive and using a toothpick to force the heads free

I have the sources preserved embedded in the DOC file of the thesis (which unfolded into whopping 40+ megabytes of mostly linked BMP images with schematics) but the disks formatted to 360K with the compiled actual executable and the source data... could not be read, sadly.
Why? Because writing a 360K (40 tracks) disk on a 1.2Mb (80 tracks) drive results in only that drive and any 360K drives being able to read it
The university computers with their 360K drives had no problems with these, as well as the old drive I have misplaced. To never be found again. ARGH. If I ever get my hands on an actual 360K drive I'm sure those disks could be read too.

Also, I had two disks formatted to 1.44Mb capacity using some esoteric tool. Windows XP could read their directory fine but trying to read actual files resulted in immediate failure. Thankfully, they both contained useless trash. I suspect I have to install Windows 98 on that machine again to be read such exotic formats. Win98 was *much* better at working with diskettes.

P.S. I also found my first ever diskette from back in 1988 I was using to store my first QBasic prorgams in the times of yore. "Precision flexible disks Manufactured by Xidex (R)", marked 2S-2D. It was able to hold about 1.1 megabytes in its youth with only the tail of it bad and unreadable sectors, but it have long since deteriorated. Now using Wikipedia I know it's actually a 720K disk. I found it empty, with 460K free (with pencil marking saying its formatted as 810K) So the rest is bad sectors, then? Nope, not touching this one, let's leave it as memento for posterity.

My drawings from back in 1988, made using a keyboard-based editor I wrote in QBasic (dot, line, fill) in EGA 200 lines mode -- those were stored on that disk at some pont as this was the only data storage medium in my possession:
one two three

[slickrcbd]

I am incredulous about the dates, especially getting a computer that runs XP with 5.25" drives. They had all but disappeared in from stores in the NW suburbs by the end of the 20th century.
I recall having trouble finding blank 5.25" disks in the late 1990's, although now that I check the date, the last time I purchased 5.25" disks was when Montgomery Wards closed in 2001. I recall that I bought all 5 10-packs that they had during the Randhurst 'Wards "Going out of business" sale.

I recall I occasionally typed a paper with AppleWorks in that era, but I'd save it to the hard drive on my Apple IIGS and a copy in txt format that I'd copy to an MS-DOS formatted 3.5" disk.
All the computers at school had 3.5" drives and fair few had ZIP drives, but I hadn't seen 5.25" drives since my high school got rid of all the Apple II computers unless you count obsolete stuff at friend's houses.


As for the disks formatted to 1.44mb, are you sure it wasn't something like 1.2mb instead of 1.44? I recall that high density 5.25" disks disk exist, and they were incompatible with my Apple IIGS's 5.25" drives. The drives wouldn't format them. I never owned a high density 5.25" drive, but I recall they were slightly less than 1.44mb.

[Cheb]

My university was still using those herds of Soviet XT rip-offs with their 360K 5-inch drives when I graduated in year 2000. What with the Great Depression of the 1990s and the universities ending piss-poor, remaining professors working for idea, not for the pitiful salary.
With additional crisis hitting in 1998 hard turning peoples' savings to ash, most of Russia skipped the 80486 moving from the 80386 straight to Pentium later.
Enough to say, USD 100 was considered a huge sum of money for most. And computers cost a lot.

The 1.44 format was crazy shit the end of the era Japanese 1.2M drives allowed for. It worked only in DOS and by extension in Win95/98.
Basically, that insane utility allowed to format a disk with different number of sectors at different tracks. In the beginning, more sectors. Because FAT only allows for rectangular configurations, the sector numbers missing on the shorter tracks were marked as bad (so the disk had a FAT of a 2.1M one with 1.44 free). You could easily store 1.44M on an 1.2M 5-inch disk and 1.75M on an 1.44M 3-inch disk. I have done that and I suspect many of my old 3-inch disks that modern USB floppy drives deem unreadable are in fact in that format.
I still have to install Win 98 on that PC, attach the 3-inch drive too and see.

[Cheb]

P.S.

especially getting a computer that runs XP with 5.25" drives

I have two fossils with mobos that still have a slot for a FDD cable. One AFAIR is Socket A with a single-core Sempron 1.6 GHz that can't SSE2 (this one PC can run Win98 - and I have drives that give its venerated Gf FX 5200 OpenGL 2.0 under Win98 -- basically it's a Win98-compatible machine capable of running TES V Oblivion) and one with socket 775 with E5200 2.5GHz (early cheapo Core2).
Both have card reader/FDD combos installed in their 3-inch holes since forever but I never bothered attaching native FDD cables to their FDD part.

[Spica75]

Do 5-inch floppies lose data? NOPE.

Data durability, the lost wonder...

Advice to modern user: if you are so foolish to turn it off before executing park.com first, the hard drive heads could become welded to the disk. You can revive it, though, by opening the hard drive and using a toothpick to force the heads free

Why? Because writing a 360K (40 tracks) disk on a 1.2Mb (80 tracks) drive results in only that drive and any 360K drives being able to read it

The write heads are "stronger" on HD drives, that alone can mess things up on a DD disk, if they're not high quality enough.

However, as long as you use the 360 disks correctly(format it as a 360 and not a 1.2M), they SHOULD work in a HD drive, they do have backwards compatibility after all(or at least all i've dealt with did?).
Similar issue when you used 3.5 HD disks with the Amiga(860kB), if they've ever been formatted in a HD drive, they generally wont work, but a HD a drive can normally read one formatted by the less dense format drive.

Hmm, you may be able to make it work by using a direct control of drive program? There's some special copy and disk rescue programs that can deal with things like this.

Also, I had two disks formatted to 1.44Mb capacity using some esoteric tool. Windows XP could read their directory fine but trying to read actual files resulted in immediate failure. Thankfully, they both contained useless trash. I suspect I have to install Windows 98 on that machine again to be read such exotic formats. Win98 was *much* better at working with diskettes.

Ah yes, the wonderful world of nonstandard disk formats...

marked 2S-2D. It was able to hold about 1.1 megabytes in its youth with only the tail of it bad and unreadable sectors, but it have long since deteriorated. Now using Wikipedia I know it's actually a 720K disk. I found it empty, with 460K free (with pencil marking saying its formatted as 810K)

"2S-2D", 2-sided, doubledensity. Definitely NOT made to hold over 1MB.
Limit of 800kB though normally used and marketed as 360kB...

My drawings from back in 1988, made using a keyboard-based editor I wrote in QBasic (dot, line, fill) in EGA 200 lines mode -- those were stored on that disk at some pont as this was the only data storage medium in my possession:

You could easily store 1.44M on an 1.2M 5-inch disk and 1.75M on an 1.44M 3-inch disk.

Yeah, unformatted space is 2MB on those. Then came for a short while the 3.5" ED disk that had a normal formatted space of 2.88MB, with up to 3.2MB on some systems possible.

#####

As for the disks formatted to 1.44mb, are you sure it wasn't something like 1.2mb instead of 1.44? I recall that high density 5.25" disks disk exist, and they were incompatible with my Apple IIGS's 5.25" drives. The drives wouldn't format them. I never owned a high density 5.25" drive, but I recall they were slightly less than 1.44mb.

5.25" HD disks are 1.2MB yes. There are a number of nonstandard variations however, as well as informal "not quite hacks".
You can read about some of them here:
http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html
There's more but i couldn't find any site trying to do a complete list.

I am incredulous about the dates, especially getting a computer that runs XP with 5.25" drives.

Eh, my brother's workplace had XP available on 5.25" as late as 2005(at least, they didn't stop using XP until much later). It's what happens when a place has literally TENS of thousands of computers and you have to continually replace everything sequentially but still maintain everything compatible with each other.

[slickrcbd]

Why? Because writing a 360K (40 tracks) disk on a 1.2Mb (80 tracks) drive results in only that drive and any 360K drives being able to read it

The write heads are "stronger" on HD drives, that alone can mess things up on a DD disk, if they're not high quality enough.

However, as long as you use the 360 disks correctly(format it as a 360 and not a 1.2M), they SHOULD work in a HD drive, they do have backwards compatibility after all(or at least all i've dealt with did?).
Similar issue when you used 3.5 HD disks with the Amiga(860kB), if they've ever been formatted in a HD drive, they generally wont work, but a HD a drive can normally read one formatted by the less dense format drive.

Eh, my brother's workplace had XP available on 5.25" as late as 2005(at least, they didn't stop using XP until much later). It's what happens when a place has literally TENS of thousands of computers and you have to continually replace everything sequentially but still maintain everything compatible with each other.

I never said that you couldn't add a 5.25" drive to an XP computer using an empty bay, I'd done that for a few people, just that I couldn't believe that any XP computers came with one standard. The last time I saw blank 5.25" disks in stores was the same year XP came out.

That said, I had some experience mixing DSDD and HD disks with the Apple II and Macintosh.
For some reason the Quadras (860 and 640av I think, 8?0 and 6?0av for sure) they had in this one tech lab wouldn't read 800K DSDD disks.
For that matter, the AppleDisk 3.5" 800K drive that came bundled with my Apple IIGS in 1988 would NOT read high density disks. They always showed disk errors when trying to format them with the GCR encoding (MS-DOS used MFM and only got 720K, although Apple's SuperDrive (their name for a high density 3.5" disk drive that could read both GCR and MFM encoding) would use MFM for high density disks). Yet if I took them to a computer with a high density drive they worked.

A similar thing happened with 5.25" disks. The AppleDisk 5.25" drive and the Applied Engineering clone (sorry, I can't recall anything other than it was an AE brand 5.25" drive, it might not have been called anything other than an "AE brand 5.25" drive for the Apple II family") would not format high density 5.25" disks. I wound up returning a whole pack as "defective" and trading it for a pack of double density disks.

Those were things I remember clearly when trying to use disks on my Apple IIGS. I would be stuck with an Apple IIGS until 1997, all through high school

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

I worked at a museum as curator, starting in 1980, and of course we didn't have computers back then. Or rather, the museum didn't - I did. I ended up using an AT clone with a 1.2 Mb 5-inch floppy and a 1.44 Mb 3.5 inch stiffy. And I had to fight for a hard drive, but eventually got one. Time went on, and the museum kept getting Newer and Better computers. I knew sooner or later I'd have to access some of the old floppy data, so I carefully cocooned and stored one of the ATs and a compatible monitor. Needed it once, too. But when I retired, they junked it. And I had no 1.2 Mb 5 inch floppies of stuff I cared for.

But I did have lots of old 3.5" stiffies with book after book on them. I migrated as much as possible to the home hard drive -- and purchased an external 3.5" drive. Plugs right into the USB port, and twice as fast as the built-in drive. It too has been useful, and I may or may not need it again some day.

This all involved a TRS III with a tape cassette drive, a TRS IV with tape cassette and floppy drive (and they had different operating systems and you had to work to get tape data from the III to the IV. In the other room, matters went from a VIC-20 with a tape drive to a C-64 with tape and later floppy drive, followed by a C-128. That last one let me get from Commodore data to CP/M data, which I could then get into IBM MS-DOS data. And there were a lot of program formats.

One learns from such matters. Write your data in the longest-lived format you can find -- DOC turns into DOCX and compatability is lost, but RTF and PDF still work. TIFF is a pain, but JPEG and GIF still work. And all my data is on a hard drive -- two hard drives, really. The second is a backup I update whenever there is a bunch of new stuff. It's external, and except when being updated it sits, disconnected. on the other side of the room. Meanwhile, the system and program disk is cloned onto a twin disk, likewise. If somebody ransomwares me, the backups can be scanned for viruses and such before I start using them.

Or as a friend occasionally barks, "CONSTANT VIGILANCE." The floppies may or may not lose data - but unless you've hung on to a drive that can read them ...

[slickrcbd]

I'm pretty sure TIFF is still around, and actually predates JPEG.
It's also hard to predict which formats will last and which will progress. GIF once seemed like a safe bet, until we ran into the 256 color limit and it meant poor quality images even compared to the lossy JPEG.

[Spica75]

For that matter, the AppleDisk 3.5" 800K drive that came bundled with my Apple IIGS in 1988 would NOT read high density disks.

HD-disks that have ever been formatted by a HD-drive, will have trouble with any non-HD drive. The HD drives leaves a stronger imprint that "lesser" drives can't handle properly.

I never said that you couldn't add a 5.25" drive to an XP computer using an empty bay, I'd done that for a few people, just that I couldn't believe that any XP computers came with one standard. The last time I saw blank 5.25" disks in stores was the same year XP came out.

Last time i personally purchased new 5.25s was around 2003 IIRC.

And where my brother works, well, when you're purchasing computers by the hundreds at minimum and thousands at the most every year, "standard" is what you ask for from the supplier. And since they could never just replace all computers at once, backwards compatibility was an absolute must have. Which meant new systems with XP on were purchased with a 3.5 AND a 5.25 included for at least the first 2 years.

For example, when they purchased the DEC Alpha-cpu based workstations back in the early 90s, they cost a small fortune and handled work that no other computers available could. When they were finally retired, less than 10 years ago, they had been relegated to mostly acting as backend servers for the internal network, except for some specialised work, because even the regular computers in every office had more performance in everything except said specialist software.

Also, for comparison of scale, when XP was released, this company had about 22000 employees, every one of which had 1-4 computers in their office(as well as a few hundred servers and several hundred more systems at various locations away from the office buildings), my dad also worked there and he had 3 as he needed 3 very different sets of specialised software, and none of the 3 were compatible with each others hardware(or even operating systems). And those compatibility issues is also what what my brother spent the greater part of 20 years fixing, it was pretty much a third of his job and the amount of inertia involved was sheer horror to deal with, and it took employing dozens of programmers for the sole reason of porting required software repeatedly before it could finally be done properly.

Anyway, my point being that while the above situation is a bit on the extreme, similar situations was and even still is by no means unusual. For example, it's less than 5 years since a friend of a friend purchased a halfdozen C64s because a car repair shop had just replaced them with new computers, as in yes, they had set up their administrative work and internal "network" on those in the mid 80s, and never bothered to update since then because it worked so well.

#####

Write your data in the longest-lived format you can find

One can try...

[slickrcbd]

HD-disks that have ever been formatted by a HD-drive, will have trouble with any non-HD drive. The HD drives leaves a stronger imprint that "lesser" drives can't handle properly.

The problem was that every package of HD disks I've ever seen in stores has been preformatted for MS-DOS.
In fact, by the time I got a Mac in 1997 (my mother got a great discount through the school she worked for, and got it as a graduation gift so I'd have a new computer for college, though I would have been better off with a Windows SHE didn't know that and it was still better than an Apple IIGS) I usually didn't bother reformatting the disks unless I was using them in the Apple IIGS.

Actually finding DSDD disks of either 3.5" or 5.25" that were not preformatted MS-DOS was a rarity. I never understood what was so difficult about typing "format a: /v" (works in Windows too), but I recall some packages advertised "Preformatted! No more trouble with formatting disks.". I've got one such thing in my closet that made a convenient disk holder if you need me to dust it off and snap a pic.

To me the 5.25" disks were not preformatted since they were for MS-DOS, but the 3.5" were once I got GS/OS System 6.0.1 and the SuperDrive that could read them.


Also note that I did not get broadband until 2002, and e-commerce was not as well established as safe as it is today. Mail order was still a viable option however. There were quite a few mail order computer hardware and software companies that didn't quite make the transition to the web, such as Quality Computers, Shreeve Systems, Sun Remarketing off the top of my head. Check old back issues of InCider/A+, II Alive! or Apple IIGS Buyer's Guide for examples (some relatives sent me magazine subscriptions as birthday or Christmas presents since they knew I was into computers).

[Spica75]

The problem was that every package of HD disks I've ever seen in stores has been preformatted for MS-DOS.

Ah, yeah that would do it.

I had to get unformatted HD disks when buying for use with my Amiga 500, but the stores i bought from always either had just unformatted or both available since they knew that otherwise they would have to also sell DD disks.

I never understood what was so difficult about typing "format a: /v" (works in Windows too), but I recall some packages advertised "Preformatted! No more trouble with formatting disks.".

Not a big thing individually no, but it did take some time, and for people at work, it was time better spent doing their jobs, especially when they needed 5-10 or maybe 30 disks at once. And of course, the majority of people working had absolutely no idea how computers worked beyond the software they used for work, so for them it WAS needed just for that, and of course, tech support also had much better things to do than to spend a day formatting disks for a few months use.
And with business being the big buyers...

Also note that I did not get broadband until 2002, and e-commerce was not as well established as safe as it is today.

2002 really isn't late. I got internet in late 1997, ADSL sometime 2001 maybe +-1 year or so and then 100/100 broadband when moving to my current apartment(fiberoptic all the way in) in 2009.

[slickrcbd]

I didn't mean to imply it was late, only that my internet access was limited. I didn't get dial-up until the very end of 1997 with a 33.6K modem, and it wouldn't be unlimited until the summer of 1998. I wouldn't get a 56K modem until after I had broadband.
I'm only giving a time frame where things like fast and quick web browsing and research was not available yet. Dial-up was slow, although I found it was mostly acceptable if I turned off "auto-load images" in Netscape and only loaded images when I thought I needed to see it (which also conveniently skipped all the ads long before adblockers were available.)

[Spica75]

Ok.

I wouldn't get a 56K modem until after I had broadband.

*lol* How useful.

[slickrcbd]

Well, it came built-in to a 300mhz Windows 98FE laptop somebody gave me second hand in 2004 after they upgraded.
Then the next desktop I bought (technically my mom bought through the school she worked for and I bought it from her) had a 56K built-in.
It would be after 2010 before I was given an external modem, mostly in an "I'm moving, could you help us pack? Oh BTW I'm going to get rid of this pile of old computer junk I haven't used in years. Want any of it?" situation.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

The worst I ever had to deal with was 110 baud. But that was in the seventies. And as sauce, the guy whose computer was at the other end of the phone line made a programming error. Used 300 baud for quite some time. These days, it's up around 40 Mbps.