Recycling DOS Disks

[Steam Ranger]

I've been looking into acquiring some new floppy disks for my Amiga, partly to replace old disks with bad sectors and partly to store new software on.

I'm looking at buying 50 disks from floppydisk.com, recycled DD DOS formatted.

In an email correspondance with their information email they suggested that DOS disks shouldn't be reformatted to Amiga, as people have previously reported problems. Can people back this up, as I personally couldn't think of a reason why it wouldn't work?

[Steam Ranger]

Ok cool.

[derSammler]

Originally Posted by Steam Ranger

In an email correspondance with their information email they suggested that DOS disks shouldn't be reformatted to Amiga, as people have previously reported problems.

Complete nonsense. The high-level format of the disk makes no difference to the Amiga when re-formatting it.

Even back then, your only choice was MS-DOS or Mac formatted.

[Steam Ranger]

Originally Posted by derSammler

The high-level format of the disk makes no difference to the Amiga when re-formatting it.

That's what I thought, I'm guessing someone must have had a bad drive and complained about the disks being bad.

[Jope]

Wipe them down with a neodymium magnet so that any drive alignment mismatches don't matter, and start using.

[Kin Hell]

Originally Posted by Jope

Wipe them down with a neodymium magnet so that any drive alignment mismatches don't matter, and start using.

What size/shape would be suitable?

Is there a method when the size is determined? - IE, from centre of disk to outside in straight lines or circular motions from centre to circumference?

These things can erase Credit Cards, Video Tape....

[Jope]

A bigger one will cover more area as you go. One wipe in any direction with a neodymium is enough to completely erase that path where the magnet went. You just need to wipe down the entire disk once.

[vk3heg]

Bullocks: I've got three 80 disk boxes full of old MSdos 720K disk's and only a few couldn't be formatted,

I used two different drives in the process just to make sure...

[Sim085]

Anyone knows if a floppy disk magnetic disk can be re-applied?

It is great to see companies still selling floppy disks, but was wondering if floppy disks deemed as un-readable could be saved by re-applying the magnetic coating on the plastic disk.

[Jope]

It's not something we can do at home.

[klx300r]

never an issue...only issue I had many times were DOA disks straight out of a brand new box...went back to stores too many times for that

[Photon]

Yeah don't worry about it and you don't have to demagnetize or anything. In the early years the disks were expensive, 3+ EUR/disk so if one didn't work the store would replace it on warranty. For used disks I guess you can't expect that, testing every disk thoroughly would raise the price. I would accept 1/20 bad disks, maybe up to 2/20 since they're used, without making a fuss. But they say they test them and they're guaranteed, so. DD disks are all the same disk and system-agnostic.

Originally Posted by derSammler

Even back then, your only choice was MS-DOS or Mac formatted.

Depends on what back then means. Before the PC got 3.5" drives, new disks were sold unformatted for the systems that already supported them: Amiga, MSX, Mac, Atari ST, synthesizers, industrial equipment, etc. It should be possible to find photos of packaging for brands such as Goldstar, Maxell, and other brands or no brand from these years with no indication of being formatted for a particular file system.

By these years, I mean 1984-1988, and no PC at all came with a 3.5" main drive until 1987, and probably not until 1988 since 1.2MB 5.25" were also getting supported for the first time.

Mac and MSX adopted early (well, just before the Amiga), and I'm not contesting that there would have been Mac- or MSX-formatted boxes of disks in 1984.

Then in 1989-1991, you could buy disks in bulk without labels. These were also unformatted.

Then after that, more and more PCs got 3.5" drives, but the majority of PC users still had only 5.25" drives, and this is why you can find boxed versions of Windows 3.1 (1991) and MS-DOS 6 (1993) on eBay. The other way doesn't say anything about proliferation, since those programs probably sold well into the late 1990s, but I can only find a single ad for a boxed Microsoft version of Windows 3.1 on 3.5", and the seller claims it's rare.

This to suggest that PCs had 5.25" as main boot drive and adoption on the PC was slow, and that by 1994 many PCs used 3.5". Then there would have been a selling point to provide the disks formatted for a particular file system.

[Sim085]

Originally Posted by Jope

It's not something we can do at home.

Ok