Floppy Disk Mounting Issue- Specifically Verbatim

[Meghan Slaff]

Hi all,

I am using BitCurator on a Linux computer to image and read floppy disks for a project at my University. For some reason, Verbatim Floppy Disks, specifically "Verbatim DataLife MF 2DD" floppy disks, are not being read. 

We are using an external USB floppy disk reader. It lights up green for a moment, makes a noise like it begins to read it, then stops and the light turns off. It does not appear in the side bar of the computer, nor is it recognized by Guymager. I tried a few different external USB readers (that successfully read other floppy disks) and none of them worked.

Has anyone else come across similar difficulties with Verbatim brand floppy disks? Are there any other tools of recovery efforts I can try to read/mount the disk so I can image it?

Any and all advice is appreciated and thank you in advance!

Best Wishes,

Meghan Slaff

Digital Archivist

University at Albany, M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives

[Kam Woods]

You may get more complete answers from actual expert practitioners here on list, but in case that doesn't happen right away:

It's likely that this is not an issue with the brand, but the fact that these are 720K dual-density disks. Many external USB floppy drives sold today will not read MF2-DD (3.5" dual-density) floppies. These drives are often built with (relatively) basic controllers that (a) allow them to work as mass storage USB devices, and (b) only allow them to read HD (1.44MB high density) disks. There *are* some very specific older model USB drives that explicitly support 720K disks, such as the TEAC FD-05PUB, but buying used ones is sometimes a roll of the dice.

A more robust solution would be to purchase a Greaseweasle v4.1 (https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle), a high quality old stock or new old stock internal 3.5" floppy drive, and a case to put them in. Or find a vendor on ebay that sells an entire drive + gw kit preassembled; these currently cost around $100-$120. This approach is a bit higher effort (particularly if you set up the drive and gw controller yourself, see https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/V4.1-Setup). However, it allows you to read and write a wide variety of image types from both DD and HD disks (https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/Supported-Image-Types) and generate raw flux images that can assist in recovering otherwise unreadable disks.

The open source Greaseweazle software runs fine in BitCurator (and most any Linux environment), is free to use in production environments, and has an active community that can help with any issues you run in to.

Kam

[Nastasia Vanderperren]

Hi,

I am a practitioner, and I agree with Kam's answer :) in my experience, external floppy drives usually only work with high density (HD) floppy disks, but not with the (older) double density ones. 

We work with kryoflux and old floppy drives, but I would also advice Kam's solution and use Greaseweazle, because it's open source. 

Nastasia  

Op do 17 jul 2025 om 02:56 schreef Kam Woods <kamw...@gmail.com>:

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[yongli z]

  I have Verbatim Datalife MF 2HD disks and several other Verbatim HD disks—all of them were successfully read by an external floppy disk drive.  However, there's one disk without a brand name that couldn't be read.  

Yongli

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