I think I accidentally damaged my games via ESD, can they be fixed?

[bleepbloop]

Pretty much as the title says.

I installed some new flooring recently, not realizing it would build up tons of static. I then handled my copy of Akumajo Dracula and Nemesis 90 and can't seem to get them working now.

Disk B of Akumajo works, but disk A seems dead. Not sure what the exact issue with Nemesis is, but I'm guessing it's corrupted.

Anyway, does anybody know if it's possible to rewrite the game back onto the disk or is it dead for good?

Would I at the very least be able to write to a new floppy, then take the inside out and put it inside the Akumajo case?

Thank you for any help!

[z964]

Short answer is you're kinda screwed. 

Long answer is:
A lot of games usually have copy protection on them, likely including those two.  It might be tricky to copy, although using greaseweasle can copy the copy protection in at least some cases.  You could otherwise write a cracked image, but then you wouldn't have the official software anymore.  Also, I'm not aware of a floppy drive that will write to disks like those that don't have the write protect square cut out.  The x68000 floppy drives sure don't.

Replacing the physical media in the floppy disk would be extremely difficult to do without damaging the sleeve since it's glued together, and you'd no longer have an original piece of media.

People still buy even known non-functional original x68000 games just to have them on their shelf.

As a final note, make sure it's not your floppy drive if you can.  Try each disk in both drives.  Try copying the contents in LHES.

[NFG]

I guess how you solve this depends on what your goal is.

For example, you don't need to re-write the original media.  If you make a working copy, play from the copy and frame the originals or something.  Original disks are going to go bad on their own, unless you were playing them very recently it's entirely likely the disks just died on their own, or the drives got fussier, or both.  I sold a lot of my X68k games like six years ago and I got a few complaints that some disks didn't work even then, and they'd been in their boxes for a decade. 

But if you really want to rewrite them, overriding the write-protect switch probably won't be too hard if you open up the drive (but I don't know deeply it's buried in the X68000 mechanisms).

You'll surely never open the disk up to remove the magnetic bit.  As @z964 said, it's glued.  Or, just as likely, heat-pressed together to melt the flaps down.  You probably could slice it open and glue it back together but that's a hell of a risk to take.

Definitely give your drives a clean and see if that helps too.

[bleepbloop]

@z964 @NFG

Thank you both for the quick answers. That's disappointing, but understandable.

I'm curious, are these disk all doomed to fail on a somewhat general timeline, or is this kind of storage media where if you use it from time to time it will 'refresh' it in a sense? I think I've heard some type of storage media does that but can't remember if it was floppies.

Anyway, it sounds like a copy will have to be my ultimate answer at this point. I don't have any blank floppies or a drive that can write. Do you happen to know of anybody that is willing to write disks and ship them, for a fee of course?

What a real shame to see these things on their way out.

Thank you again for the help. Very much appreciated!