Old PCJr floppies - toss?

[Percussionista]

Hi... We're cleaning up the house too. I still have the tricked-out PCJr boxed up but also a box full of 5.25in floppies from the PCJr era. It's been a long time since I had the Jr out, and at that time every floppy I tried was unreadable. I presume that the floppies themselves can't even be re-used, loss of magnetism and such? So, sadly, just toss all those memories?

[Brutman]

You might just have a dirty floppy drive. The heads need periodic cleaning, and the rails need to be cleaned once in a while two. Without that maintenance the drive might have trouble positioning and reading correctly.

Unless your floppy disks were stored in terrible conditions, they should be readable. Most of my original PCjr diskettes from 35 years ago are still fine.

I wouldn't toss them ... send them to somebody to have a look first. You never know when there is a unique device driver or something useful on the diskettes.

[Hargle]

I will gladly be that somebody to take a look through those floppies and try to get any usable data off them. This goes for all forum members here.
I'll even pay shipping both ways to just borrow the any disks you have stashed away. Send me a PM!

My goal is to preserve any and all DOS games/edutainment titles for an archive I'm building and you just might have something that has been lost to the sands of time, but without looking, we will never know! In the process of vacuuming up all the games I can find, I do pull in drivers and applications too, so if the disks are readable, everything will get preserved forever.

[OldComputerGuy]

I second the idea of having someone who is in a better position to do so look over the floppies to see if anything can still be salvaged from them. A lot of old software is no longer available due to aging media and if even just one of those discs has something on it that was previously thought to be lost then it is worth trying to preserve it.