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PROBLEM WITH FLOPPY DISK

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concisa

Technical User
May 7, 2006
15
US
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Disktools from norton utilities.


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