Erasing CF2 floppies

[Bryan M]

Hello

I have forty or fifty used CF2 three-inch floppies previously used on Amstrads. Many were donated to me and in turn I'd like to donate through the forum, but I'd like to make them unreadable first. I no longer have a CF2 drive. Do you think a professional cassette tape eraser would do the trick? I have access to such a machine at the local Talking Newspaper and it copes with chrome tapes well.

Regards
Bryan

[Dave Moll]

If you are willing to trust me with the content if the erase doesn't work, I would be happy to test one for you after you have tried your tape eraser on it.

Let me know if wish to pursue this and I'll PM you my address to send the disc.

[paulsherwin]

If they were donated to you, then they're unlikely to have highly confidential information on them. This is a very different situation to a used modern hard drive which may have all sorts of personal information and passwords on it.

I understand that you want to be careful, but if I were you I'd just trust forum members to use them responsibly.

[Courtney Louise]

I would be very very wary of using a bulk eraser as you will lose the sector information on the disk itself making them completely unusable.

I have a Spectrum +3 that I could format them on assuming they were used on a word processor I shouldnt be able to read the contents on a +3 and can then format them.

Also would like my name in the hat for a few of these as I only have the demo disk that came with it.

Andi

[techiesteve]

Either a bulk eraser or a TV degausing coil/stick will erase them, I've used both many times in the past.

[julie_m]

Sectoring on floppy disks is laid down during formatting (except some really ancient machines used an index hole to mark each sector, and some totally ignored the index hole) so bulk erasure won't harm them. I've put enough 5.25" disks through a Weircliffe machine to know it's safe; and 3" and 3.5" floppies are very similar, just smaller, better armoured and indexing is done from the motor aot the disk. Bulk erasing is handy for persuading disks that have been formatted in a 40 track drive to re-format in an 80 track drive.

[Bryan M]

Many thanks for your suggestions. Most of the disks belonged to a church organisation which I helped convert from Amstrad to IBM (sorry!) so I'm a bit wary about their privacy. I'll take you up, Dave, on your offer of checking a bulk-erased couple and take it from there. It'll be a day or two before I can get to the TN studio. I'll PM you.

I remember in the early days of floppies that it was not recommended to take them aboard tube trains because of the supposed strong magnetic fields. Perhaps a couple of circuits of the Circle Line would do the trick?

I think you're outvoted Andi but you're in the hat for donations.

Bryan

[emeritus]

I think a magnetic field needs to be really stong, and alternating, to affect floppies. I did once do some experiments on some floppies with permanent magnets and a home-made electromagnet powered from a car battery. Even wiping the poles over the surface of the disk had no obvious effect, as a subsequent disk check indicated no errors.

I have never heard of the Underground being a problem. On the other hand, a friend who used to work for Customs & Excise told how, in the 1970's, whenever a particular lady used to take the weekly data on computer tape from the Southend to the London office, it was often corrupted. After investigating they found that she always travelled in the "ladies only" compartment next to the guard's van that trains in the London area used to have, and always put the tapes in the luggage rack over her head. The pantograph and switchgear were located over the guard's van, and the line voltage changed between 25kV and 6.25kV several times on the journey. As the tapes were only a foot or so away from the circuit breakers, it was not surprising that they became corrupted.

You would need to use a bulk eraser to guarantee that all the data had been wiped. It should be remembered that the PCW uses different parts of the disk when formatting single sided and double sided disks. A way of getting extra disk capacity was to first format both sides as single sided, and then format as double sided. If you turned over the double sided disk, the old single sided menu would appear, and the sectors that had not been overwritten by the double sided formatting could be used.

[Dave Moll]

A pair of CF2 discs arrived in the post this morning. I'll fire up one of my PCWs later and check them out. As they say, "watch this space".

[Dave Moll]

The delay has been rather longer than intended, but I have finally managed to get a 3" drive into working condition - they have all suffered the stretchy drive belt syndrome.

I can confirm that neither of the discs which Bryan sent me are readable. Unfortunately, I do not appear to be able to reformat them as they claim to be write-protected even when the write-protect tabs are in the non-protect position. I was surprised, but it may well be that Andi was right about sectoring information needing to kept intact for the DISCKIT formatting utility provided with the PCW. Maybe it just does what is known in DOS as a quick-format.

Any thoughts about alternative utilities for formatting PCW discs?

[julie_m]

It's more likely that your drives are faulty No floppy disk has anything magnetically pre-encoded on it. Anything CP/M-ish, and that includes Amstrads and Spectrums, will have to use (or at least properly emulate) a real FDC chip, for compatibility's sake.

[Dave Moll]

Could be. I'll try a drive that I knew was working before the belt gave out. It may be that the drive that I "got working" can read but not write, as it was from an untested PCW.

[Dave Moll]

Actually, it was only faulty inasmuch as I hadn't firmly reseated the circuit board after lifting it to replace the drive belt.

Four sides of CF2 discs successfully reformatted. I think Bryan is safe to pursue his intended course with his discs.

[Courtney Louise]

Yay, I would still be interested in 10 or 20 of these for my +3

[Bryan M]

Thanks everyone and especially Dave. I'll move this now to the For Sale thread. Jarl, you're still in the hat for some.

Bryan

[DragonForce]

Write proteced CF2 floppies even tho the tab is in place? Ok, when you changed your drive belt, you lost a small pin out of the guts of the drive. This pin is 10mm long, 1.15mm thick and has a rounded head of 2.98mm diameter. It looks like a long thin rivet. Assuming you can't find it, you can make a new one from a small panel pin type nail, but it has to be straight and it mustn't be too thin.

CF2 drives are a pain in the rear end!

To format these 80 track floppies on the +3, put your original 40 track disk in the drive, type this:

CAT "A:"

you will get a list of the disk contents - but it will also log in the disk That's the important bit....

Then,

FORMAT "A:"

When the machine warns you about losing data etc, take that disk out and replace with the 80 track formatted floppy, and tell the +3 to carry on.

That will sort out the problem

You can add a PC 720Kb to that +3 you know! Once you've done that, you'll never go back to 180Kb CF2's.

[Mad Mal]

If you think the 3" discs used by Amstrad were quirky. I just found a Yamaha EMQ-1 Midi Data recorder that uses 2.8" Quick Discs. I have two (presuming that there isn't a third still in the machine) discs to go with it.Some MSX Computers had external storage drives that used the Quick Disc.