```just a word of warning, copy everything off them [commercially-available flippable 5.25" BBC Micro disks] quick, as the 'side2' goes backwards to the cotton cloth cleaner inside the 5 1/4" case, so basically all the crap caught in it then end up coming out when playing other flip side :('''
(No idea how common this phenomenon might have been! - I've always had double-sided drives, so I've always used the other side of the disk in the normal fashion.)
The 1st thing you do on apple II diskettes (5.25") was using a scissors to allow the other side to be writable as well.
No exceptions (alternatively you just break the plastic switch that tells if there is copy-write protection, on the floppy driver, itself)
I have taken the floppy out of the sleeves to dry them out as the entirety of my collection fell in the aquarium.
My first boss out of college had a side job maintaining check encoding machines for a local bank (imagine a room full of these machines, staffed by people who were glad not to be working in a warehouse anymore, who spent their hours typing in the dollar amounts people had scribbled on the paper checks they had written to the supermarket, carwash, dry cleaners, etc.)
These machines ran off a program that was stored on 8" floppies. All the workers had been told to NEVER EVER touch the floppies. Well one night, a disk went bad and had to be replaced. To the horror of the operator, my boss ripped the magnetic media out through the spindle hole, looked at it closely, and proclaimed "Yep. It's bad"
Ah, an obscure catch! Most of the 8" floppies were soft-sectored though I believe the original ones were hard sectored. I only once ever used a hard-sector drive + media.
Yeah I actually had a couple machines that used them. One was an Altos something like this
http://www.vintage-computer.com/altos8000acs.shtml and the other was some single cabinet scientific job. I forget if the hard-sectored disks would work in a soft-sectored drive or not; perhaps it would just ignore the holes.
