This is nuts!!!!

[ParaSitius]

Just spent the last hour going through my collection of floppy's trying to find a working copy of Workbench 1.3 

Do floppies have a limited life-span before they start to degrade and lose info?

[ParaSitius]

Either the copy of 1.3 I'm currently using is unstable or I've forgotten just how easy workbench can crash.

Dammit, not again.

[Hungry Horace]

workbench crash??

haha - not likely

yes disks do degrade.... even the magnetic pull of the earth is slowly wiping them all. and that doesnt even allow for disk-quality and other factors which might cause them to die.

suggest you get a copy of ADFBlitzer and put a new copy from ADFs onto fresh / working disks.

[ParaSitius]

I'm just trying to back up my two Wings disks, even the manual says I should do it.  Just having trouble with disk 1 which WB1.3 just can't seem to read when I choose the duplicate option.  I even tried using XCopy 1.3 which worked on disk 2 ok but failed on disk 1.

[The Chaos Engine]

i had more problems with 3,5 disks with my mac+ and a500 than those 5,25 for my c64.
I would bet 90% of those 5,25" disks still work.

[Hai]

i had more problems with 3,5 disks with my mac+ and a500 than those 5,25 for my c64.
I would bet 90% of those 5,25" disks still work.

Yeah it like the 3.5" disks are more vulnerable than 5.25". Most of my C64 disks still work while many Amiga disks have errors. DMS (was it called that?) and ADF is great security!

[Hungry Horace]

yes it was called DMS.

and IPF (CAPS) is even more so essential for preserving disks.

although since i dont know if the IPF reading code is open source, we are unlikely to ever see it supported on pspUAE.