Floppy Disks Archives - Alex's Piano Service

Properly Shipping Floppy Disks

When shipping floppy disks, it’s important to package them securely to prevent damage during transit. Follow these steps for safe and efficient shipping:

Shipping One or Two Disks

  • Attach the disks to a flat piece of cardboard with a rubber band to prevent bending.
  • Place the wrapped disks in a padded envelope or plain manila envelope and mail.

Shipping Multiple Disks

  • Use a cardboard box for better protection.
  • Bundle the disks in sets of five using rubber bands to keep them secure.
  • Wrap the bundles in bubble wrap, Ziploc bags, or even paper for added protection.
  • Fill any empty space in the box with dense foam or extra bubble wrap to prevent movement.
  • Try to keep disks at least two inches away from the edge of the box.

Additional Tips

  • Label the package “Magnetic Media” to prevent mishandling.
  • Avoid using packing peanuts, as they offer poor protection.
  • For hard drives, use dense foam or small-bubble bubble wrap for proper padding.

By following these simple steps, you can begin shipping floppy disks safely!

Yamaha Electone Performance Disks

I was recently contacted by a person attempting to copy their Yamaha Electone Performance Disks. These files are not visible on Windows, and if you attempt to open the drive you’ll see “The disk in Drive A is not formatted.”

However, I was able to open them with WinImage (https://www.winimage.com/).

This will allow you to write them to another floppy disk, or store the files for the future.

The software is shareware, and costs $30 after 30 days; however, this will give you plenty of time to verify that it works for your disk duplication needs!

You can also save these images as .ima files, and they should be suitable to convert to .hfe files for use on USB floppy disk emulators such as the Gotek or Nalbantov. This is something to test.

You could also duplicate these disks using Keirf’s Greaseweazle, if purchasing extra hardware to do this is an option.

These files do not easily convert from Yamaha’s ESEQ format to MIDI.