Reading old 5.25" floppies

Question

Summary: Having problems reading some old 5.25" floppies. Looking for advice on what else I can try before declaring the disks un-retrievable and giving-up.

Details:

I recently found a box of old 5.25" DSDD floppy disks dating for the about 1988-89. They are MS-DOS FAT format. They seemed in good physical condition and I don't think they'd been stored near strong magnetic fields or in extreme temperatures, so I decided to have a go a reading them. I acquired an old Compaq Deskpro 5100 XL (which as a 5.25 capable floppy controller and BIOS) that was about to be dumped and bought a reconditioned Canon MD5201 360kb drive and a new floppy cable off ebay.

I fitted the 5.25" drive and connected it and the existing 3.5" using the new cable and replaced the bios battery. The bios recognizes the 5.25" drive as drive B. The PC only has 16mb of memory so I installed NT4 SP6 on the hard drive.

The 5.25" drive spins-up when I insert a disk, and if I try to view the contents of the disk using NT file explorer then the drive access light illuminates. After about a minute I get an error dialog saying "B:\ is not accessible. The device is not ready." This happens for each disk. I decided to sacrifice one of the disks by formatting it but get the same error. If I boot the machine into dos then I get "Not ready reading drive B" when I try to read any of the disks.

I think the most likely explanation is that the disks just aren't readable after all this time. But I find it suspicious that (a) all the drives have completely failed in apparently the same way, and (b) a pack of 3.5" disks that were stored with them are perfectly readable.

I've tried using a different (old) floppy cable and a 1.22MB Teac floppy drive instead, with the same results.

Can anyone suggest anything else I should try (software/hardware) before giving up?

Edit 1: Clarified that they are MS-DOS disks

Edit 2: I had to leave this for a while, but I have now followed-up all the suggestions made by those who helpfully left answers and/or comments. After trying two different drives with every combination of cables, socket positions, and jumper settings, I've come to the conclusion that the floppies just aren't recoverable. Unfortunately this was always the most likely outcome. Thanks to all those who provided advice when there wasn't likely to be a simple answer that I could accept. I have up-voted the answers that were useful.

Answer 1

5 1/4" disks were notorious for losing data. Don't need to store them near a magnetic field, they can self-demagnetize. The next problem is that tracks are located by a stepper motor. This means that you might actually need the original drive that wrote them in order to read them. Tape drives and floppy drives go out of tolerance as they wear. Conversely, they could have been written in a drive that was dead on in calibration, but your current drive is out of spec despite the supposed refurbish and can't read them.

I'd find someone with a known working 5 1/4" drive and see if they can read them. This will tell you if your drive is dead. You've done the only other thing I can recommend and that was to try a different drive and cable. As long as you got the arrow, red stripe and pin 1 lined up on the motherboard header socket (important for the ones that didn't have a key), it was relatively hard to hook up anything wrong on the 5 1/4 drives with the edge connector. 3 1/2" drives were notorious for getting things connected up wrong.

Answer 2

You may have to inspect and configure the floppy drive. Old hardware is not plug-n-play.

There are often four (4) jumpers for drive select. You should (always) use "drive 2", the second of the four positions, when you have a floppy cable that uses the cut & twist on the drive select lines.

There may be terminating resistors, especially if it is a really old floppy drive. Later model floppy drives had electronics that automatically "terminated" the line. Since you have only one floppy, the terminating resistor pack must be installed (if necessary), and the last or end connector of the cable should be used (when there is more than drive connector).

Go into the BIOS setup menu, and verify the the floppy drive is setup for 5 1/4 DS/DD. The "modern" default configuration is for 1.44 MB 3.5".

EDITED drive select jumper info.

Answer 3

Could be that the data cable connector is not connected properly (turned by 180 degrees). If this is the case, floppies inserted may be erased!

Answer 4

From the Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard and soft sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM and GCR.

Other data suggest that while the disk structure might be similar, the methods used to read/write were not locked in. Scroll down to the Structure section of the link.

then in FORMAT, where it explains that Apple commodore and IBM were not fully compatable

As far as the magnetics. I have a very old video machine that uses them. they still work. the density was very low. an old Cassette tape will still have some magnetic polarisation left on it, weak but still operational, depending more on how the plastic holds up. not the "metal" ??

Some very old magenetic media (of all types) the plastic flakes off, clogging the heads very quickly, that first layer of heavily oxidised plastic. Take the one you sacraficed and rub your finger across it like a read head might, see if it might be messing up the reader.

Answer 5

Don't forget to clean the heads often!!!!

Remove any metal covers hiding the head assembly. I set the drive on the table in front of the computer with a long floppy cable.I use 2 wet cleaning system disks 1 with isopropyl alcohol and 1 dry. Use the wet disk first, "retry" the disk a few times to get the head to move back and forth. Use the dry next to "dry off" the heads.

I find some old disks will have trouble reading until the head has touched the whole surface once or twice. Ignore errors and let the head step thru the full 40/80 tracks. Clean the head often during the process because the trash will pile up on the heads. Use a flashlight to inspect the cleanliness of the head surface.

Use a program like WinImage to copy whole disk to image file *.flp or *.vfd , save any copies that make it thru with out ignored errors, you may only get one chance! sometimes the trash will pile up on the head and gouge off the oxide layer...that disk will be trashed. After a few passes the program will often be able to read perfectly in one pass.