Retrocomputing Stack Exchange
Retrocomputing Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [floppy-disk]

Use, restoration and imaging of floppy disks; low-level formats of floppy media. Consider [file-system] for high-level formatting.

Floppy disks are a magnetic storage medium that enjoyed great popularity in the 80s and 90s. Common physical sizes for disks were 8″, 5.25″ and 3.5″ with varying storage capacities.

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Did personal computers ever support 8" floppies?

When I look at the following picture, it seems a bit awkward to me that personal computers ever supported 8" floppies (unless the size of your computer case was as big as a fridge !): Am I right or were there any personal computers that supported…
Eric Cartman
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What is between the sectors of floppy disks?

I've found this page which has an informative description of how sectors were encoded on floppy disks: http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/ibm-pc-floppy-disks-deeper-look-at-disk.html Do the gap bytes span the entire space between…
CJ Dennis
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How long can a floppy disk spin for before wearing out?

I'm mainly interested in 3.5" floppies here, as they're what I have lying around, but other sizes could also be interesting to hear about if anyone has the data. As I understand it, the head rubs against the disk and the disk rubs against the…
spacer GIF
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What are the three or four holes on the back of a 3.5inch floppy disk indicating and used for?

Why do 3.5 inch floppy disks have sometimes three and others four holes on the backside? What's the difference, what do this holes indicate and what are these used for?
Bob Ortiz
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Why were 5.25″ floppy drives cheaper than 8″?

The first floppy disks were eight inches. This size was set by IBM; I haven't been able to find any indication of why they chose it, but maybe it was just because it seemed quite small to them compared to the hard disks they were used to. According…
rwallace
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Can my floppy disk still work without a shutter spring?

One of my floppy disks' shutter spring got lost. Now the shutter can't slide normally. Can I still use the floppy disk?
Ryan Almirañez
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When low-level formatting a floppy, how does one ensure any existing sector markers are overwritten?

If a formatted floppy diskette is reformatted with a low-level¹ format, how does the formatting routine make sure that any previous sector markers are fully overwritten? In particular, how does it make sure that the first sector marker from any…
cjs
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Can you use 5.25 HD floppy disks in a DD drive?

Is is possible to format and use 5.25 high density disks in a double density drive?
Matthew
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Was drilling 3"5 720 KiB floppies to 'upgrade' them to 1440 KiB at all reliable?

I remember back then, there were few people that used to drill an extra hole on them to double their capacity. Surprisingly, it worked! While the other way around is plausible I am quite unsure of the reliability of such transformation in the long…
Eric Cartman
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Using a 360k (DD 5.25") floppy with Windows XP?

My PC XT clone went up in smoke (literally) the other day. I salvaged the half height 5.25" double density floppy drive though and dropped it into an old 1.8 ghz AMD tower I had laying around. Plan is to migrate whatever I can forward onto more…
Brian Knoblauch
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How to build a workstation to handle bulk quantities of floppy disks?

I need to handle bulk quantities of floppy disks, where I archive their contents, then recycle them by formatting them for use on old Amiga/Atari/MS-DOS computers. I have a 3.5" floppy disk drive mounted in my current computer thanks to a 34 pin to…
Informancien
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How to at least partially read damaged sectors of floppy disk?

It is necessary, that the floppy drive, just like CD-ROM, attempts achieving 100% data integrity using the help of error correction. If a sector is not readable, it just does not get sent to the computer. Software does require full data integrity…
neverMind9
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Why is the RDY signal on floppy disk drives disabled?

While look at some 3.5" floppy disk drives I have, I noticed they have a little resistor missing next to RDY and, looking it up online, I find some instructions for adding a resistor there to enable it. What is it and why would I want to enable it…
Sydius
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Was there a special drive, that saved much more than 1.44MB on an HD floppy disk?

I think that I have once seen an Internet article, which stated, that special drives are capable of making many megabytes of data out of one ordinary MF-2HD floppy disk. But I am unable to find it again. Did such a drive actually exist? Is there any…
neverMind9
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Does low-level formatting improve floppy disk longevity?

I have a dozen or so 3.5" floppy disks from the 90's and most of them show bad blocks when I scan them with badblocks. If I do a low-level format, where the sectors are laid down again, will that make the floppies more reliable? I don't care about…
Sydius
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