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Chips 386
Posts: 34
| I've got some boxes filled with floppy disks that comes from different places. Some have perfectly fine disks, some other have floppy disks having issues being read and some are in a really poor shape. They're so bad that some of them actually killed some of my floppy disk drives 
I suspect some of them to have somekind of moisture on them. In the box of really bad floppies are also fully functionnal ones with valuable software on them, and I fear that moisture could be already on them. I'm actually dumping the best I can every floppies from that box before they all go really wrong (I managed to save the data of a really old version of Microsoft mouse for example, but that was really hard to do) but like said in the title, I'm fearing that by puting other floppies in the drives that I used to dump the "bad" ones or just by having them close to each other I could contaminate them. Maybe I'm just paranoid and there is no moisture any of my floppy disks and the problems I'm having are caused by something else (humidity ?), but if I'm right, this could lead them to a terrible fate ...
So I'm asking you if you don't know any sort of "cure" I could do to them. I thought about putting every floppy disks in different closed boxes with a volatile product that would kill moisture, but I don't know what product could do that ...
Like I said, maybe they don't have this problem at all, but I'd feel better if I was sure that they were "clean"
Edited by Deksor 2017-03-20 12:07 AM
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | perhaps these? https://www.amazon.com/Dry-Packs-Cotton-Silica-Packet-Pack/dp/B0038N... | |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | Otherwise, a sealed container with rice is said to be the poor man's solution. Never had a problem with those silica bags though and maybe I'm also paranoid, as I tend to hide them around the innards of my cases, generally behind the motherboard tray or empty drive bays.
With floppies it is worth bearing in mind that they will all theoretically fail at some point, the magnetic coating does not last forever.
While I'm here, on the Compaq thing; It struck me as odd that Compaq listed it as a 3.1/95 system as it really did give me an NT vibe from the start. | |
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Chips 386
Posts: 34
| Yeah me too.
When I heared that they came with windows 3.x I thought "well maybe they meant NT 3.x ?" but when I saw a "DOS" folder in the HDD of that PC, this lead me to the conclusion that it was a DOS/win3.x machine and not an NT one. This makes that machine even more interesting I think ^^
Anyways, thank you guys, I'll look for that ^^
I know that one day every floppy disks would fail, but at the moment what i'm trying to do is to backup them as some of them can't be found on the internet or if they can, I've got a version in a different language than english which is "better" since I'm not a native english speaker ^^ (I don't have problems understanding english, but having an old program that talks to you in your language feels always better ... Except if they were translated poorly XD)
Once they will be backed up, I'll upload them to that website : win3x.org which contains tons of english and french software. I don't know if you knew this website as it's 90% a french site, but they have an international board.
Edited by Deksor 2017-03-20 8:17 AM
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How to prevent moisture to spread on my floppy disks