Mouldy floppies

Now to examine the floppy discs - I tried another disc, which as far as I could tell looked fine. Pop it in, and . . . this time, not so good. Disc fault went the beeb, “drrrr-beep!” went I . . .

Closer inspection - carefully rotating the disc, and . . . mould. Faint, but there. Arrrgghhh! Again, a good resource at RetroClinic covering the do’s and don’ts of floppy disc de-archiving.

So, erring on the side of caution I went to clean the heads (what other crud has built up unseen?) and a kit to clean the discs. Now, a floppy drive head cleaner is now a rare commodity, and not something you want to use repeatedly, so I was intrigued to see a cleaner for rent on eBay. Not only that, it was offered by CJE micro’s - a blast from the past (they used to supply kit for the BBC Micro back in the day - and are still going). So, order placed, breath bated.

Next mission - the discs themselves. I opted for a 3D printed frame from 8 bit heaven again via eBay; this hold a 5.25” floppy sleeve stationary whilst you can rotate the disc in the sleeve - and wipe it (carefully) with isopropyl alcohol to remove the mould. Hopefully it’ll do the trick and the discs are just grubby, rather than broken. We’ll see!

So, in the meantime, I had to resort to . . . the cassette tapes! “What could go wrong?” - quite a lot, as it turned out . . .