Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?

Learning Company software has been pretty well archived at this point. To me, the easiest approach would be to hold onto the original box/packaging for sentimental purposes, and just find a copy of it on a site like the Internet Archive.

If your goal is to use it on a period-correct system, I’d go with 34/40pin adapters that lets you read flash cards, USB, etc.

A lot of my friends have kept their old 486 computers, and everything is period-correct except for the hard drive and floppy drive which have been replaced with a CF-to-IDE for the HDD and Gotek running FlashFloppy firmware for the 3.5".

10 years ago I heard “you’d better read all the floppy disks you’ve got now because you won’t be able to do it later.” You might do better with better hardware, you might not. This thing can get at the raw data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KryoFlux

which might let you get most of the bits from a bad block. See

https://goughlui.com/2013/04/21/project-kryoflux-part-1-the-...

> My first attempt at restoring 1991 Learning Company Spellbound for DOS for my children is dubious. Despite being stored nowhere near magnetic sources, there are read errors on the 3.5 inch floppies and Linux could not mount them.

FWIW, it's long been my experience that floppies (like CDs and DVDs) have a half-life and they degrade quickly upon reaching it. You'd have been lucky to be able to recover those in 2001. Now? If at all, only high-end forensic tools could recover them.

If you have something that's not already archived on archive.org, you might consider reaching out to Archive Team, who may be able to help you figure out the best way to read it accurately and avoid any errors.

(If you have something that is already archived on archive.org, the best way to get an accurate image of it would be to download it from there.)

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Spellbound_1...

> If I take the time to bring back to life a more period correct system with an actual IDE floppy drive would it read the disks more accurately?

It's worth noting that floppy drives (with rare exceptions like the LS-120) do not usually have IDE interfaces. In the PC space, floppy drives instead use, well, floppy interfaces. They're completely unrelated to everything that is IDE. (More specifically, they use floppy interfaces that are based around what the Shugart Associates used in the 1970s with their SA400 floppy disk drive -- but ~nobody says it like that.)

> One option for hardware is my parent's Leading Edge WinPro 486. The case looks to be in good shape but I have not opened the case to see the condition of the capacitors yet.

Cool! Way back then, we tended not to have so many problems with electrolytic capacitors. Boards didn't tend to use so many of them and the capacitor plague was not yet a thing.

It's possible that my risk profile is misaligned, but: I'd start by just turning it on and seeing if it works.

Feed it some floppy disks. See if they read.

If it shows positive signs of life, then: You can try your copy of Spellbound.

If that works, then: You can use the old machine to transfer the software to a newer machine. Methods vary (and that's a few steps out), but they usually involve the serial port on the old machine and a USB to serial adapter for the new machine. Sometimes, with a null modem adapter. (It's kind of a whole thing...and it kind of was way back then, too.)

Your idea is sane. You're already facing the problem of degradation of magnetic media; compounding it with dubious hardware isn't helping. Why can't that disk be read? Is it the disk, or this drive of dodgy origin? Or some combination of both?

An old drive will likely benefit from some cleaning: head, contacts.

The disk appears visually in good shape. It has been stored all these years in the original box in an air conditioned basement. I am not seeing any white material or other obvious corrosion. However, I can confirm that my first attempt to read the imaged data failed. I did not record the output from ddrescue but it was something like 34% on the 1.4 MB. Got a corrupted screen when trying to run the installer in a Windows 98 SE QEMU vm. I have not dug into it very deeply.

Another comment mentions a KryoFlux. A cheaper alternative is a GreaseWeasel (£30, $30). The 4.1 version even has USB-C as a connector. You will need an external power brick with a 4pin Molex connector for 5.25 drives. You can buy these standalone or they might come with a SATA/PATA/IDE Hard Drive to USB converter. Can also use an old PC power supply if you fake the power on signal.

I've had quite a lot of success, almost 100%, over quite a long time - both 5.25 and 3.5. I did use older drives intended for "desktop" machines. The drives from Japanese companies seem to be the most reliable; NEC, TEAC. The 3.5 USB Portable diskette drives are based around laptop floppy designs. You won't be able to find a direct 5.25 to USB adapter (or modify one to work) as the speeds / data rates are all wrong, so you will need something like a GreaseWeasel or old PC for those.

I've used different reading mechanisms over the years; an old PC running Linux with a real floppy chipset + custom raw reading code, custom hardware with an F82077 + Atmel + SDCard, and most recently a GreaseWeasel.

The floppies I've recovered were stored relatively well, but were mostly my and family members data - not commercial floppies. If there is any copy protection on the floppies you are trying to read you may need to capture the flux transitions. For these, I'd check archive.org to see if someone has already generated a copy.

For 5.25 floppies fingerprints and surface blemishes can be softened / removed with ISO Propyl and a Q-tip. Floppies designed for cleaning the heads of drives seem to now be very expensive / non-existent. Manually cleaning the heads of a 3.5 drive is way more difficult. I've got ideas about using Face mask / filter material to create a cleaning tool, but it is on the experiments to try list.

Even back when floppies were a thing, I found that 3.5 drives were more un-reliable between machines than 5.25 drives. I think there was more variation in head alignment and track positioning. When I've had issues, I've always been lucky in that switching the drive vendor / model made reading the floppy possible even if it took multiple attempts or was very slow.

Good luck.

I have other disks, including personal files, that are not mass market. Including some very fun early "Rietta Solutions" programs by my learning days. I was very early mimicking the look and feel of commercial shareware at the time, including printing diskette labels with version numbers and copyright dates with an inkjet.

It's hard to say. If the disk is borderline it's possible for it to be readable in one drive and not another. I have a couple of working machines with 3.5 inch drives so maybe ask around if a coworker or someone else you know has? I've read diskettes older than that but you never know. GreaseWeasel mentioned in the other comment might help as well.

An LS-120 mechanism (see "SuperDisk"), being designed for much higher density, can sometimes read the data.

If you're patient, you can find a PC with a floppy drive at a thrift store/goodwill for $10-$15. In my area, I see them several times a year. I have a handful of USB floppy drives, one IBM, one generic drive from the Bondi blue iMac era, and both have worked about the same.

I've had a few discs fail with sector errors that have done nothing but sit in storage for 30 years. In that case, it was fortunate enough to contain a hidden duplicate of the file for the installer to copy.

The diskettes are going to demagnetize over 35 years, I don't think a 90s disk drive is going to make a difference.

Maybe, maybe not. Floppies were always on the verge of dying all the time, even in the 80s and 90s. It's why anyone who cared about their data always had at least one backup copy of any important disk or data. (Most software explicitly told you to make a copy for regular use and keep the original safely stored away.)

My guess is the disks or drive are bad. I have a similar modern Chinese USB 3.5” floppy drive and a box of disks from the 80’s and most of them seem to work fine in that combination.

3.5" Floppies are either DD or HD. (there's more but let's keep it simple and practical)

A DD drive reads and writes DD floppies better than an HD one, but does not read/write HD floppies at all.

There's a hole in the floppy for write protection (hole covered = write enabled), and there's another hole on the opposite side to signal the floppy is HD. If it's missing, it is DD.

To recover a floppy, a USB drive is about the worst option, as they only expose a decoded floppy, and not the raw data, besides other annoyances.

You'll want a period correct HD FDD, or DD if your floppy is DD and your HD drive is having trouble with it, alongside GreaseWeazle[0].

As for that old 486, you'll want to open the case ASAP and remove the motherboard's CMOS battery, before it destroys the whole thing.

Capacitors aren't anywhere near a concern; most likely they're still fine, and will typically not destroy anything.

0. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

FWIW, it turns out that all USB floppy drives nowadays are made in the same factory, and all of them are kinda glitchy. Go buy an older model on eBay instead of buying new.

Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48827092 - July 2026 (71 comments)

https://hackaday.com/2026/07/07/its-now-imperative-that-you-...

https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/

Old diskettes can be a problem especially storage that suits the white menace bacterial / fungus that can grow on the surface and cleaning can sometimes remedy but unless it's spots that can be got though the window with an ear bud, disassembly is required.

The thing I'd recommend is search of an image of the disks if they exist. Next best is an emulation eg [1] [2] which I found by way of google and yandex

[1] https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-game.php?abandonw... [2] https://archive.org/details/super-solvers-spellbound-dos-en-...

My goal is to get more of this good DOS and early Windows educational software working for my children.

FYI, you can play in the browser on Internet archive: /msdos_Super_Solvers_Spellbound_1993

That meets your stated goal.

A more fun solution might be a Mister. If you're unfamiliar, it's like a hardware emulator. I've been playing gizmos and gadgets on it. If you really want the feeling of swapping disks, I have my Mister installed in a Macintosh iisi case asking with an nfc reader. I put nfc tags on old blank floppies so that when I insert the disk into the case, the nfc reader reads it and software (zaparoo) loads the game based on the tag...

[flagged]

[flagged]