3 comments
The internally linked article is much better than this <a href="https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/" rel="nofollow">https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/</a>
The part about head cleaning says "high purity" isopropyl alcohol and then says 70-99%. There's little reason to buy anything other than 99%. Additionally some of the same cleaning swabs and wipes sold for fiber optic patch cable and bulkhead connector cleaning are well suited for this.<p>These are low cost generic/bulk items you can buy from chinese sellers via Amazon or other sources. If it's good enough to clean 9/125 singlemode fiber it should be good enough for floppy drive heads. Ignore the reel-type cleaners that look like a mini betamax tape, and the push click cleaners, which can only be used on real fiber stuff. Go for the swabs and kimtech wipes.<p>visual examples of what the products look like:<p><a href="https://focenter.com/products/fiber-optic-cleaning/production/bulkhead-swabs" rel="nofollow">https://focenter.com/products/fiber-optic-cleaning/productio...</a><p><a href="https://www.occfiber.com/product/kimtech-lint-free-wipes/" rel="nofollow">https://www.occfiber.com/product/kimtech-lint-free-wipes/</a>
I would like to see approaches to recovering data from fragile disks by placing the inner disk on a flat surface and using some kind of imaging technology to measure the magnetic fields - perhaps an electron microscope could do the job at low enough field strengths?<p>Using this I imagine it might be possible to not only read the disk data, but perhaps even previous versions of data that has been overwritten.
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