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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2017 18:21:19 -0500
From: gfretwell@aol.com
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Subject: Re: Do any stores still sell floppy disks?
Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2017 19:21:04 -0400
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On Sat, 04 Nov 2017 15:13:34 -0600, james@nospam.com wrote:

>On Sat, 4 Nov 2017 03:48:30 -0500, VanguardLH  wrote:
>
>>There are tools to refresh magnetic media.  I remember GRC Spinrite had
>>it.  Others have a refresh, too (I think HDD Regenerator has refresh).
>>Haven't needed them in so long that I long ago was too old in my version
>>of Spinrite to qualify for an upgrade (and it costs more than many
>>HDDs).
>
>Going way back to the Dos days, I had a friend who I'll refer to as a
>"computer geek". He was good as a technician, hacker, and probably had
>darn near every piece of software one needed at that time. I had an old
>IBM PC (floppy only) computer. I took it to him, and he hooked up a hard
>drive to it. I still recall buying that USED hard drive at a computer
>store, and paying a fortune for it. It was something like 10 megs. 
>
>After connecting the hard drive, he ran Spin Rite on it. I recall that
>took hours and I had to come back the next day to get my stuff, since I
>think it ran all night. The next day I got my computer and he said that
>my hard drive was good. I was new at all this stuff, and I was impressed
>by Spin Rite, so before I left, he gave me a copy of it on a floppy. 
>
>Since I later archived all my floppies onto a hard drive, I still have
>that old Spin Rite. So, if I boot my Win98 machine to Dos, can I run
>that old version of Spin Rite to regenerate some floppies? Will that
>work?
>
>I have not used any of that old stuff in years, but I always kept all
>software if it was useful. 
>
>Also, since I just bought 5 new blank floppies on ebay, should I run it
>on them? They are NEW floppies, but probably "new old stock". I had
>already planned to re-format them, but maybe I should do more.... I knew
>that floppies went bad over time, but I never knew why. Now I do. 
>Thanks for the info.
>
I have dragged out 30 year old diskettes and the data was pretty much
toast but you can bulk degauss them, format and they seem fine to use
again. I have a bunch of diskettes archived to disk image files and
when I load them fresh they seem fine. I did a DOS 6.3 load recently
and after refreshing the diskettes it was OK.
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