Well, it's been a few months since I posted to the group asking how to
restore "dead" floppies, and one tip* that was given was to use
isopropyl alcohol.

I've not had these old Macs booted since I read that message, been
hellish busy, but I just fired up my Performa 5320, applied some
alcohol to my Civilization floppies that had hitherto resolutely
refused to be read, et voila! The discs all mounted!

It took a few attempts, actually, maybe 4 or 5 applications of alocohol
to each disk before each finally mounted. I was able to back-up each
floppy to hard disk, too.

A great result! I intend to work through my entire collection of
big-box floppy games. :)

I have ditched a lot of disks over the years that refused to mount.
Damn shame, as if I knew this trick I could probably have salvaged a
lot of them. PD, newsletter/user groups stuff, magazine cover disks,
all lost, like tears in rain. :(

Anyway, massive gratitude to Mr Finnigan for the tip!

*I cannot reply to the post where the tip was given, as it seems
Eternal September has suffered a catastrophic failure and lost all
messages older than a couple of months. I hope Ray Banana gets them
back!

On 2024-09-14, scole <vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, it's been a few months since I posted to the group asking how to
> restore "dead" floppies, and one tip* that was given was to use
> isopropyl alcohol.
>
> I've not had these old Macs booted since I read that message, been
> hellish busy, but I just fired up my Performa 5320, applied some
> alcohol to my Civilization floppies that had hitherto resolutely
> refused to be read, et voila! The discs all mounted!
>
> It took a few attempts, actually, maybe 4 or 5 applications of alocohol
> to each disk before each finally mounted. I was able to back-up each
> floppy to hard disk, too.
>
> A great result! I intend to work through my entire collection of
> big-box floppy games. :)
>
> I have ditched a lot of disks over the years that refused to mount.
> Damn shame, as if I knew this trick I could probably have salvaged a
> lot of them. PD, newsletter/user groups stuff, magazine cover disks,
> all lost, like tears in rain. :(
>
> Anyway, massive gratitude to Mr Finnigan for the tip!
>
> *I cannot reply to the post where the tip was given, as it seems
> Eternal September has suffered a catastrophic failure and lost all
> messages older than a couple of months. I hope Ray Banana gets them
> back!

Thanks for reporting back. 🙂👍🏼

--
E-mail sent to this address may be devoured by my ravenous SPAM filter.
I often ignore posts from Google. Use a real news client instead.

JR

In article <140920240727420035%vintageapplemac@gmail.com>,
scole <vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, it's been a few months since I posted to the group asking how to
> restore "dead" floppies, and one tip* that was given was to use
> isopropyl alcohol.
>
> I've not had these old Macs booted since I read that message, been
> hellish busy, but I just fired up my Performa 5320, applied some
> alcohol to my Civilization floppies that had hitherto resolutely
> refused to be read, et voila! The discs all mounted!
>
> It took a few attempts, actually, maybe 4 or 5 applications of alocohol
> to each disk before each finally mounted. I was able to back-up each
> floppy to hard disk, too.
>
> A great result! I intend to work through my entire collection of
> big-box floppy games. :)
>
> I have ditched a lot of disks over the years that refused to mount.
> Damn shame, as if I knew this trick I could probably have salvaged a
> lot of them. PD, newsletter/user groups stuff, magazine cover disks,
> all lost, like tears in rain. :(
>
> Anyway, massive gratitude to Mr Finnigan for the tip!
>
> *I cannot reply to the post where the tip was given, as it seems
> Eternal September has suffered a catastrophic failure and lost all
> messages older than a couple of months. I hope Ray Banana gets them
> back!

That's great news! And sorry to hear about the other floppies you threw away - I
also tended to do that, though mostly with old blanks that initialization. Will
try the isopropyl alcohol next time. Since they're not making them anymore, I
feel really bad about throwing floppies away ... even though I have enough to
last until I'm 100 I think :-)

Could you please take a moment and check which of your floppies have been
preserved on macintoshgarden.org already? You might have something not archived
yet that we run in danger of losing forever otherwise ...

In article <info-F634A2.08395815092024@news.individual.de>, Sebastian
P. <info@cornica.org> wrote:

> In article <140920240727420035%vintageapplemac@gmail.com>,
> scole <vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Well, it's been a few months since I posted to the group asking how to
> > restore "dead" floppies, and one tip* that was given was to use
> > isopropyl alcohol.
> >
> > I've not had these old Macs booted since I read that message, been
> > hellish busy, but I just fired up my Performa 5320, applied some
> > alcohol to my Civilization floppies that had hitherto resolutely
> > refused to be read, et voila! The discs all mounted!
> >
> > It took a few attempts, actually, maybe 4 or 5 applications of alocohol
> > to each disk before each finally mounted. I was able to back-up each
> > floppy to hard disk, too.
> >
> > A great result! I intend to work through my entire collection of
> > big-box floppy games. :)
> >
> > I have ditched a lot of disks over the years that refused to mount.
> > Damn shame, as if I knew this trick I could probably have salvaged a
> > lot of them. PD, newsletter/user groups stuff, magazine cover disks,
> > all lost, like tears in rain. :(
> >
> > Anyway, massive gratitude to Mr Finnigan for the tip!
> >
> > *I cannot reply to the post where the tip was given, as it seems
> > Eternal September has suffered a catastrophic failure and lost all
> > messages older than a couple of months. I hope Ray Banana gets them
> > back!
>
> That's great news! And sorry to hear about the other floppies you threw away
> - I
> also tended to do that, though mostly with old blanks that initialization.
> Will
> try the isopropyl alcohol next time. Since they're not making them anymore, I
> feel really bad about throwing floppies away ... even though I have enough to
> last until I'm 100 I think :-)

Yeah, it is causing me genuine pain to think about the *hundreds* of
disks I threw away over the last decade or so... All my years of
eBaying for vintage Macs had generated piles upon piles of floppies,
and on a few occaisions I went through stacks of them, keeping/backing
up the good ones and ditching those that wouldn't mount, assuming they
were knackered. I could have saved a lot of them, it seems... :(
> Could you please take a moment and check which of your floppies have been
> preserved on macintoshgarden.org already? You might have something not archived
> yet that we run in danger of losing forever otherwise ...

I generally upload any software I salvage to my own site,
vintageapplemac.com, and I know that from time to time folks from the
Garden find stuff there and back it up. I'm going to try and get in the
habit of dumping stuff to archive.org but I can't see me also putting
things into the Garden religously. Feel free to have a trawl on my
site, anything you see that might not be in the Garden, snag it. I
uploaded some Electronic Young Telegraph floppies earlier this year, I
wrote a blog about it; couldn't do anything with the files as am
missing the main EYT programme floppy. :(