What are best practices for cleaning floppy drive heads?

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 22:40:25 +0000

When working with legacy floppy disks, do you ever clean the drive heads? If so, when? Are there any established best practices for floppy drive maintenance?

What settings should be used when imaging floppy disks using a Kryoflux device?

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 18:06:36 +0000

I'm trying to write a small program to identify floppy disk formats automatically in order to enable efficient bulk disk imaging.

Details of the approach are outlined here.

As part of this I need the program to create every possible variant of disk image in order to test each to find out which type of disk it actually was.

For this to work I need to know what possible types of disk there might have been. For example, double sided disks, single sided disks, disks that should be read at 300rpm, disks with 40 tracks, disks with 80 tracks, etc.

I will be using the Kryoflux device to do this work and the settings options within that include:

Image Type
Start Track
End Track
Side Mode
Sector Size
Sector Count
Track Distance
Target RPM
Track physical position - side 0
Track physical position - side 1
Start track
End track
Flippy/not flippy
Output Image Track Order
Disk Density

I don't have a lot of knowledge of disk formats however and so am hoping that others will know what settings I should include in the program. For example, are there other RPM that disks were read at aside from 300 and 360? Also, Are there any standard sector counts? (etc).

I have started a spreadsheet to capture options here. I do not want to circumvent the use of this site so can you please give any answers you can on this site and in the spreadsheet also if possible. I will ensure that any that are only posted on this site are consolidated in the spreadsheet and included in the program.

Digital Preservation Q&A - Recent questions tagged floppy-disks

What are best practices for cleaning floppy drive heads?

What settings should be used when imaging floppy disks using a Kryoflux device?