Bad floppy disc

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May 13, 2003 | 10:48 AM

Raul

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Senior User

Joined: Apr 2000

Posts: 359

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From: Northern Virginia

Bad floppy disc

I can tell just from what some of you guys do, that we have some real computer whiz kids here. Not like us old folks who learn enough about computers to keep a job.

I have a floppy disc with some MS Word files on it -- but I can no longer read it. It just says Disc not formatted, format now?

Guys at work (where I am now) say they cannot check it because they do not have Norton Utilities.

Well, I have Norton Utilities at home. Should I get my hopes up that I will be able to recover the files with Norton?

Any special pointers on using Norton to do this, or any other advice on recovering the files is welcome and much appreciated.

Thanks

May 13, 2003 | 10:54 AM

couleeman

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Joined: Jan 2003

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From: Magrath

Bad floppy disc

I wouldn't get your hopes up but you can try it. I just had a few floppy disks that were just plain old and and it came up with the same error. DISK NOT FORMATTED. I ended up losing the pictures on the disks. Thank goodness for backup copies.

May 13, 2003 | 11:00 AM

jbalestri

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Joined: Dec 2002

Posts: 1,297

Likes: 3

From: Billings MT

Bad floppy disc

Try Viagra

Oops, wrong thread.

I saw floppy.....

I'm going now.

Honestly, usually once that happens, the disk is totally lost. The part of the disk that the computer reads to tell it where to go to get the information is gone. So, even if you save the disk, it probably still won't know where to go to retrieve what you want. You can try it, but don't expect any miracles. If it does work, then you'll be happy.

May 13, 2003 | 02:14 PM

rebocardo

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Joined: Jun 2002

Posts: 13,873

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From: Atlanta GA

Bad floppy disc

Try it on a few different disk drives. They only cost $8-$12 brand new for a reason. Because they are built dirt cheap, hardly anyone uses them, and you will not know yours is not in perfect alignment unless you share disks.

It is more likely an alignment issue than a bad disk or if it is a 720/800K disk, then you might have to find a 800k drive to properly read it.

May 13, 2003 | 09:47 PM

angus

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Joined: Jun 2001

Posts: 1,236

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From: Vancouver Island

Bad floppy disc

First thing, do a disk copy to a new disk (copy the whole disk). If it complains about errors, tell it to ignore them. Then try Norton on the copy, not the original. That way you don't do any more harm to the original. "The Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide", by Mark Minasi has some good info on data recovery.

May 13, 2003 | 11:02 PM

RBrendel

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Joined: Feb 2002

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Bad floppy disc

sometimes if you expose them to heat or magnets they will screw up. ive had tons of papers lost because of the damn sun. (they were in my car)

May 14, 2003 | 06:11 AM

tomw

Logistics Pro

Joined: Jan 2002

Posts: 4,907

Likes: 39

From: suburban atlanta

Bad floppy disc

try, try again. Most times, a floppy drive is not used enough to keep the dust off the read/write heads. A floppy may appear to be 'unformatted' and actually it is the disk drive ...
You could try another machine, or take the drive apart and clean it, or get a 'floppy cleaning disk' that you put in the drive and attempt to read, thus cleaning the heads.
If it is really important, you can take it to specialty shops that 'may' be able to retrieve the data.
tom