Shugart 850 drives

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Dec 9 20:00:45 2004

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Steve Thatcher wrote:

> I have been moving data off 8" disks recently that I have keep in dry storage
> for over 25 years. I, for the most part, have had no problem reading those
> disks or formatting "new" disks that I have kept for the same amount of time.
>
> But then again, I have no had mice living in my floppy drives... :)

That's good to hear. The mouse thing was odd; the floppy chassis
spent most of it's time on a desk in a bedroom-turned office.
The mice had to travel a ways to get into the disk cabinet, where
they took up residence in A:, nibbled the stepper leads down to
(repairable) nubs, crapped/peed in a toilet area convenient for
meeses but poor for P.C. board life, left B: alone (I swapped,
etc) and nibbled the edge off the 50-pin ribbon cable. Luckily
only one conductor, for about 4", so I'll repair it. I suppose
being mammals everything they do is oddly ingenious.

If the A: Shugart 851 PC board is ruined it'll make a nice
repair unit, as it's great mechanically, just swap the board.

The floppies (media) are clean and as neat as when they were
stored 20 years ago (unless they went in dirty, and a Magic Elf
took them out and cleaned them) so I anticipate no particular
problems. A couple boxes worth of new DSDD of various brands,
plus I have a new/sealed box of DSDD Verbatim (not Dysan like
I thought, too bad) I bought from a stationary store that was
(big surprise) going out of business.
Received on Thu Dec 09 2004 - 20:00:45 GMT