On the other hand, floppies may go bad for other reasons: The magnetic coating may come off gradually due to friction, and a detoriating sleeve material will speed up this process. If you low-level format them, you'll also refresh the flux pattern that's used for "administrative" purposes (finding sector start and end), not only the data itself. The magnetic flux pattern on the floppy disk that is used to store the sector address, the begin and end markers, and the data itself, gets weaker over time. How long they'll stay usable depends on a lot of things. I haven't had trouble finding "tested working" used 3.5" floppy drives on eBay to plug into my KryoFlux and Greaseweazle for under $30 Canadian including shipping from Europe.It won't improve "disk longevity", but it will make the disks usable again.
There's a Purchase a Greaseweazle page on the GitHub project's wiki and I managed to get a bare Greaseweazle V4, delivered, for about $36 Canadian. though the Flu圎ngine is a DIY "solder a connector or some pin header onto an FPGA dev board and flash it using Windows software" project and the dev board is suffering from the chip shortage. (The help for KryoFlux's dtc CLI also lists a -we=2 option to set an erase mode of "wipe" when writing which may have a similar effect to gw erase followed by writing such an empty disk image.)īoth the Flu圎ngine and Greaseweazle can be had quite cheaply as far as such boards go (you'll still need a floppy drive, possibly cabling, and possibly an external power supply, depending on the board and whether you buy a bundle). The Flu圎ngine software recently gained filesystem support and supports Greaseweazle hardware too, so its new fluxengine format command may do what you want.Īlternatively, you could see if something like gw erase followed by writing an image of an empty disk would do what you want. should be physically capable of it (they do deal in raw flux) and it's just a matter of software support. According to ArchWiki, the ufiformat tool can command those cheap USB floppy drives to perform a low-level format.Īside from that, while I can't vouch for it myself, since I've only ever used mine to read floppies, archival/forensic USB floppy controllers like the KryoFlux, Greaseweazle, Flu圎ngine, etc.
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