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That's what people do with tools like Kryoflux; the head of a floppy drive doesn't touch the disk, it floats above it and picks up the magnetic flux. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxsRpMdmlGo covers a lot of it.


The head of a HDD floats, FDD heads slide on the surface.


For archiving a very old floppy, you don't want to touch the surface if you can help it to avoid causing any additional wear.


Have you come across any ways to achieve that out of interest?


A possibel way, I have not read the paper yet.

Found this promising material https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371624900_The_do-it...

Found via google search with words >>DIY 3d printer Floppy Disk, MAgnetic flux<<

( I understand it would produce massive amounts of data, since it is recording the analogue value of the magnetic flux level readings. )


Looks like this would require ?3? orders of magnitude higher resolution to start resolving data on floppies. Least dense DD disk is ~6000 bits per inch, ~240 bits per mm.


Thanks a lot, will have a look, that sounds very interesting!


Kryoflux had special drives for preservation but I don't see them in their store anymore. So no, sorry.


Special in what way? The most special thing about Kryoflux was their EULA claiming _every bit of data imaged with Kryoflux hardware belongs to Kryoflux_

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/ti...


Special in setting the jumpers to disable writing before sending them to customers, probably.

I believe kryoflux license / EULA is what triggered Keirf to write GreaseWeazle.

Now, GreaseWeazle is vastly superior to kryoflux.


Thank you for the correction. Either I never knew that, or I had indeed crossed the wires about how they work.




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