Are These Floppy Diskettes Dead or Am I Missing Something? (Question)
I have a couple of floppy disk holders lined with 3.5" floppies that I brought home from my mums last year - most of them are blank, but are fully working.
However I have a stack of 10 blue diskettes from "PC Line" - labelled as "3.5 DS DD 1.0Mb"
Whenever I insert any of these into my test-drive (which is a generic USB floppy drive), I get a very slow response and if I run formatting software, it takes 60+ minutes to run a scan before just reporting an error.
I would simply put this down to it being 30 year old hardware, but it seems too coincidental that it's all the blue PC Line diskettes - all my other various brand disks all read and write just fine. I also noted that they are labelled as 1.0Mb opposed to the standard 1.44Mb size, which adds a variable to them.
If I run a format through explorer, it attempts to comply, but then reports the disk is protected(?)
I've attached a couple images below, anyone have any clue or idea what could be causing this or if I'm missing something with these diskettes?
Many thanks in advance!
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Posted Jun 14, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC