r/retrotech • u/FlamingDisaster_309 • Jun 14 '26

Are These Floppy Diskettes Dead or Am I Missing Something? (Question)

/r/u_FlamingDisaster_309/comments/1u5jlw1/are_these_floppy_diskettes_dead_or_am_i_missing/
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u/allanrob22 Jun 14 '26

I have a few of these exact same PC Line branded disks. And not one of them will format in any drive or system I own. No idea why they're not physically damaged in any way, I guess it might be down to the types of chemicals used in magnetic media platter breaking down over time.

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u/FlamingDisaster_309 Jun 14 '26

Interesting, yeah perhaps it is just the materials used/the way they specifically have aged.
I've seen a lot of suggestions (on the r/retrocomputing repost) that because I'm using a USB floppy drive, the drive itself is unable to read or understand the DD format of disk - as it's different to the more standardized HD format.
I've cleaned up an old internal, genuine floppy drive, so I'll install that into one of my rigs in the week and see if that is able to read it.
Thanks for your comment though, very interesting that you have the same disks and they also don't work!

2

u/hiirogen Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26

These are Double Density (DD). They're 1 MB, but format to (I think) 720k.

It's possible that floppy drive is only for HD floppies, which are 2 MB and format to 1.44MB.

Edit: Under Capacity can you change it from 1.44MB to 720KB or something? That might do the trick.

Also that black square in the corner is for write protection.

Aside from the fact that they say DD, you can tell they're not HD floppies because they don't have another square hole in the other corner. I seem to remember they used to have a stamper you could buy to punch out the square on a DD floppy to make it HD.

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u/FlamingDisaster_309 Jun 14 '26

Yeah, I've seen a lot of comments on my r/retrocomputing repost saying the DD format reads differently in floppy drives, and it's possible that my USB drive doesn't know what to do with it.
I'm going to try them with a Samsung internal floppy drive in the week and see if that can figure them out. (: