I have just spent a jolly day wrestling with old 5.25 inch disks and QL microdrives!
Ah, nostalgia. Got my original 1984 JM QL, Gold Card, 5.25 and 3.5 inch drives attached, a big boxful of old 5.25 inch disks (many of which I never copied to 3.5 inch disks all those years ago) and a box of cartyridges from the same era. The results of my attempts with these ancient media, probably 15 years old, were interesting. 29 out of 30 microdrive cartridges read OK with FORMAT RAM1_MDV1 Out of 120 or so 5.25 inch disks, 6 (yes, just 6) read OK. Well over 100 of these disks failed, either not reading at all or giving lists of files but bad/changed medium errors when trying to copy. The reasonable conclusion is, I suppose, Sir Qlive 1 Rest of World 0. I suppose there's a chance the 5.25 inch drive might be past its sell by date, but since a few disks did read OK (some of the disks were DS 40 track 720 sector, some DS 80 track 1440 sector, so I presume that the drive must 40/80 track switching automatically (it does have a switch on the back too, but that seemed to make no difference). As there are a few of my old programs on the disks I couldn't read, and it might be an interesting exercise to update some of these, if anyone has access to 5.25 inch drives and a willingness to try to copy these for me, I would be very grateful. I was VERY impressed though that all these microdrive cartridges which have been unused and in the attic for 10 or more years almost all worked OK first time! We may have said not nice things about microdrives in their time...but they've proved reliable for me in the long run! -- Dilwyn Jones
