PROBLEM WITH FLOPPY DISK

[concisa]

I am in the process of converting all my old archived files from floppies to a CD-ROM with an intermediate stop at the Hard Drive. For this conversion process, I'm using an old Athlon 700Mhz with Windows 98 SE installed. Everything worked fine, except for about 8 of the more than 300 floppies I transferred. Of course, these are the disks I could not possibly lose.

Here is the problem:
(1) Windows "thinks" these disks are empty. But it does not say the disk is unformatted.
(2) The data recovery software I have -- PC Inspector -- does not see the files either.
(3) It shows no deleted files either.

I remember an old package of Norton utilities from the early 80's that could read any disk (even damaged ones) and allowed for editing, copying, all kinds of great stuff. Unfortunately I don't have them anymore.

I hope that someone out there know how I can save, recover or get to those files. Perhaps an utility such as the old Norton package?

Thank you very much for any help.

 

[wolluf]

Floppies are fickle beasts.

I've never heard of that Norton package - have you tried googling for it?

My efforts to recover data from recalcitrant floppies consists of:-

Try the floppy in as many drives as you have access to - often one will read when most won't.

If your system actually thinks the floppy is ok - even though reporting no content - try running scandisk and defrag on it.

 

[concisa]

I tried googling it....but I only got results for the newer Norton utilities. The ones I mentioned are from the early 80's...they were DOS utilities.
Thanks for your interest.

 

[edfair]

Disktools from norton utilities.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[jazzgirl]

Did you try Oldsoftware.com?

http://www.oldsoftware.com/ibm.html

They have a lot of stuff. You might find what you're looking for there.

JG

 

[felixc]

Try to read your disks on another system.

 

[dglienna]

There was an old package called Double-Space (or something close) that let you get twice the data on a floppy. If you didn't run dblspace.exe, you couldn't see the data so it appeared blank!

Not sure how to recover, but loading the exe might help

-David
2006 & 2007 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)
2006 Dell Certified System Professional (CSP)