Reading 19 year old floppy discs

[1993matias]

Hi!

I just recently bought a vintage game which turned out to be on two 3,5" floppy disks. As I didn't have any floppy-reading computer any more, I just put the game away. But I have just found an external floppy drive, so I thought I'd copy the files over on my pc. The problem is that the drive (or my pc, don't know which) can't read the disks.

I wasn't sure whether it was because the disks are old, or if they are mac-formatted, so I downloaded TransMac, a program for Windows that can read mac formats. That didn't work, so I am suspecting it is a problem with my computer.

When I try to open drive A:, Windows asks me if I want to format the disk before use. I say no, because there is data on the disc, so Windows refuses to read it.

Is it anything you can help with?

Disk drive is YE-8U10:

http://www.yedata.co...lti/4xslim.html

Computer is Acer 7750G with Win7 64-bit.

if you need any more information, I'll gladly provide you with it. Thanks in advance for your help!

[MANEMAN]

Hi there. Welcome.

I think you can probably guess what I am going to tell you even before I start.

Floppy disks were / are notoriously bad as a storage medium. In many cases the coating on them came away from the backing along with the magnetic properties required. Floppy disk drives also had a high incidence of failure, so unless you can try both the drive in someone elses computer with good floppies, and also try the floppies in a known good drive, you are basically working blindfold and are going to waste a lot of time. It just gets more and more frustating not knowing which is a fault with no way to prove it. 19 years old may not be out of the question for the floppies if they have been stored well, and of course away from any magnetic fields.

It would seem that W7 is recognising the drive ok. In the past when I have had good floppy disks and received the format message like yourself, it has turned out to be the drive itself. I dont think we could go any further with diagnosis without carrying out the steps I have mentioned.

If you are hell bent on playing old games the best thing to do would be to install an emulator and go looking for your game/s. Many of them are free. It will probably take a little while to get your head around the concept of emulation, but after looking up a few websites with the help of Google you will soon get the hang of it.

Hopefully you will find a friend with a good floppy drive that you can use. In the meantime here are a few links about emulation and old games. Both emulators and games are downloadable. - i.e they are not physical objects. :)

http://lifehacker.co...tro-game-arcade

http://www.freevinta....com/emulators/

http://www.freevinta...ions/index2.php (Instructions page)

http://www.retro-gam.../emmulation.htm

http://www.snes9x.com/

[1993matias]

Thanks for the quick reply! I will try another floppy drive as soon as I get my hands on one.

I don't know how they were stored until I bought them recently, so no clue there.

I can try an emulator if it doesn't work at all. Thanks a lot for your help! :D

(The game in question is Sim Farm from 1994 :P )

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

I would first try if you can write/read with an empty floppy disk on your current device; that way you'll know if it's the drive or the disks that are the problem.