After spending days getting old hardware put together and finding and loading
an operating system that would work with the disk editing software I found my
5.25" drive was dead and not revivable so about 50 to 75 diskettes will not get
looked at. It turned out almost 100 3.5" diskettes were to be checked. Most
were fully functional and readable. Dates on the data put their age at >10
years with a couple looking even older if the dates were correct. Some are
most likely about 20 years old or so but that is strictly a educated guess.
There was about 30 with issues. 22 diskettes were not readable and appear to
have been formatted on a PS/2 so nothing is usable/recoverable from them, if
that assumption is correct their age would be >20 years old. Even with version
5 of Norton Utilities I could not get them viewable even bypassing the
formatting. The remaining about 9 3.5" diskettes have multiple issues which
Norton Disk Doctor and Disk Editor appearing at this time to be dealing with
them although it does appear there really was nothing worth recovering on the
ones I have worked on at this point. One of those diskettes did have physical
issues with very little usable files recoverable. I only had 9 100 MB Zip
disks. 5 gave up their data easily and it turns out the drive works on a
desktop hard drive converter to USB so I just might keep this drive around for
a while although I don't know if I will trust data to the disks. Micheal, Sam
and Daniel had a couple of tricks that helped to some degree with the remaining
ZIP disks. The eraser tricked helped some and the trick with blowing into the
disk worked to some degree as well. I think as Daniel and Micheal pointed out
the antistatic was/is sticking to the actual disk. I did a modification of
Daniel's idea and freeze thaw it to see if I could get them unstuck without
damaging the disk. The first one I tried using only the eraser and canned air
at least did something but it ended up giving me the "click of death". Wood
pencils have for the most part been replaced by mechanical pencils with most
people not evening using them. One of the secretaries/clerks/helpdesk staff
had a pen with a very nice eraser which I liberated and returned to her to keep
her happy. On the ZIP's I used the freezer trick on, one began working to some
degree. One started the "click of death" the final two still don't work at
all. The ZIP disks were all of a similar age the oldest file appears to be ~17
years old they be even older as I did not do a really good search through I was
able to get. This would put them about the time I put together the hardware
that had a ZIP disk drive in it for the first time. At this point as per client
request all 5.25" and 3.5" media has been permanently destroyed. I am waiting
on further instructions on the ZIP disks. The CD's and DVD's have all been
stacked and return to the client but I believe they will be returned for
shredding at some point.
The good side of this is I have a functional Windows 98 SE system which I
virtualized. I have loaded some old software and hope to finish loading all of
the retired software (word processing, spreadsheet, data base, and graphics)
that I have and need to convert data files to a generic format for
reexamination.
