Foolstroupe -

Imation stopped making disks in May of 2003, and won't help you find them (although they might still have a few in stock). Their site links to lists of a number of retailers who probably have had some disks, but with no guarantee that they'll actually have any left.

While you might not want to put money into your old machine, you might consider a USB external Hard Drive that you could transfer over to any new machine you might get. In my area, you can get a 60 or 80 GB external for under $150, and smaller ones as low as about $60. This would give you a place to get your data off of those floppies while you can still read them. If you don't have a USB port, you should be able to get a card to put one in for $30, maybe even cheaper; although you may have some trouble finding one for your old card slots - most of the new ones are PCI connect.

You could consider an external CD burner, but any new machine you get will probably have one built in, so there's less likelihood of "useful" carryover.

If your Imation drive craps out, Imation offers a data "recover to CD" service, but it's $15 (US) per disk to be recovered, plus $2 per CD returned, with a $50 "setup charge" per order. Do it now yourself, if you have anything on those disks you really want to keep.

If you have, or can install, the USB port or an etherlink port, almost anyone with a laptop could probably copy your files and carry them to a burner NOW. You might even be able to rent a laptop with a burner for a day,but friends are cheaper (usually). Rather than looking for more disks, I'd advise getting what you have on them now to a safer storage, at least if you have anything there that might be useful on your new machine. [No manufacturer discontinues a product that's working well enough to make a profit?]

And dumping the data you have to CDs (that you'll be able to read when you get the new computer) will at least give you a few empty ones to play with now.

I haven't looked at the Syquest recently, but I suspect the situation is similar.

John