Floppy Disk Reading Error

My friend was I was filing something on a floppy and hit a wrong key. Now he gets a message that the floppy is not formatted and if he wants to format it, everything will be erased.

Is there any way to save what is on the floppy? He doesn't have the documents on his hard drive, just the floppy disk.

I suggested to him to try the software, evaluation download, BadCopy Pro, but he responded with the following:

"I used the software. Had to go to Lost files and Mode #2. It brought up all 38 files (recovered). Said there was 1 bad sector out of 2880.
Their software is $40. Is there a less expensive version? "

I guess it will not allow him to access the files unless he pays the $40.00.

Is there another (inexpensive) way to recover documents from a floppy disk.

Thank you for your help.

Jean

 

There is, if you have or can get a copy of DOS. The RECOVER command got a bad name in the late 80s and early 90s, and you'd see magazines like PC/Computing telling you to delete or at least rename RECOVER.EXE. But all the fuss was not because RECOVER was bad but because people were using it in the wrong way.

Your problem is exactly what RECOVER was made for. If you can do a DIR on the disk (and it sounds like you can't), go to A: and then type RECOVER FILENAME.TXT and do the same on each file. (Even though the command accepted wildcards, only the first file would be acted upon.) If you can't do a DIR on the disk, then do: RECOVER A: instead.

Either way, RECOVER will put the recovered data into files with a .REC extension. What you can do with those files is anyone's guess. Just examine and try them. But at least any bad sectors will be marked out without a reformat. Salvage all you can then toss the disk. Floppies are too cheap to keep around with bad sectors.

If RECOVER tells you the directory is full, you will have to delete some files to create new directory slots for it to work.

Not all DOS versions have RECOVER, so if you decide to buy DOS at auction you need to check first. I also don't know how well RECOVER will do if you used long file names on the floppy.

If you have access to a Linux system, you may have another way. Try mounting the floppy, and if it mounts, type this in your home directory: tar cvf floppy.tar /mnt/floppy
Unmount the floppy then mount another that has been formatted. Then you cd /mnt/floppy and then "tar xvf $HOME/floppy.tar ." to put the files back on.

 

Thanks for your help. We were able to recover most of the files from the floppy using a Windows 98 computer and not his XP computer.

I don't know why that made a difference but it did.

Thanks for your help.

Jean