I have a 3.5" floppy which I cannot read in a normal computer floppy drive. The error message I get is something to the effect that the disk doesn’t seem to be formatted; do I want to format it? I assume that some part of the disk has just degraded to the point where it cannot be read.
Do any of you know of any sort of data recovery program or data recovery service that might be able to circumvent this problem?
I know that the most likely outcome is that the floppy disk is just kaput. On the other hand, if there is no way to get the data off the disk, we’ll have to OCR or retype a 200+ page book. So, I thought I ought to try exhausting all of the possibilities before I give up on the floppy disk.
No - that will pretty well guarantee that it will be unreadable by normal means.
One scheme would be to try it in various floppy disk drives, to see if any are able to read it. (This assumes you have access to multiple drives, which may be dubious.)
Back in the day I’d have used a program called SpinRite. I don’t know if it’s still available or would work with a more recent computer, but you could look into it.
1998 called; it wants its post back.
Didn’t old versions of Norton (back when it was Norton) have specialized undelete and recovery routines? Wonder if they’re still available anywhere.
There are companies out there that specialize in recovering data from unreadable discs, but they are pretty expensive. If you’ve tried several computers and can’t get the disc to read, that may be your only option, other than manually recreating the data.
I know of a couple of programs - badcopy pro (free trial available), and flopshow (freeware). Results are not guaranteed, of course.
Or since your boss has old floppies lying around, see if he also has a copy of Norton 6, which did a good job of this back in the day.
The media may well simply losing magnetisation. So a normal drive won’t be seeing a strong enough signal to reliably get data. This is a different problem to a floppy with data damage (ie bad individual sectors, corrupt blocks). I would certainly try the recovery programs, but they may not get enough traction on an old floppy.
A specialised recovery company will likely have gear that allows for greater signal gain, and can tweak things to get the bits off the floppy. However no matter what, the signal to noise will be much less than optimal, and you should expect errors in any recovered data. So, it is worth pricing professional recovery against OCR. OCR will have errors too, so there is no easy answer. A big scanner with document feed can make short work of OCR’ing a book however.
If it has nothing on it i.e., it was never formatted to begin with it will prompt you to format. Are you certain there is something on it? Go with the suggestion above and try other disks, that you know contain data.
The above is certainly a possibility, but the reality might be a lot simpler and cheaper.
In the last few years of me using floppies, I increasingly found that the drive heads were slightly out of alignment. The result was a whole bunch of floppies which could be read easily by the pc which had written them, but not in any other pc. That pretty much defeated the whole idea of using floppies to transfer from one pc to another, but it was still okay for backups.
My first point is to explain WHY some posters above suggesting trying an assortment of pcs, in the hopes that one may read it. Secondly, though, you might get lucky with a data recovery company – It’s entirely possible that there’s nothing physically damaged with the floppy, and maybe not even much magnetization loss. They just MIGHT be able to read it very cheaply.
The most common problem is that the original drive writing the 3.5 disk had it’s read-write heads somewhat out of factory alignment. This scenario will work fine so long as the disk is only read on the machine with the out of spec drive. Try to read it on another machine and you get nothing.
I’m assuming some recovery centers might have hardware that could deal with this.
You might also try “Spinrite”. It was designed to do what you are trying to do. If there is anyway possible for the disk info to be recovered and read with your existing hardware Spinrite will try it.
Legit data recovery places like Drivesavers, luck isn’t an issue, they are distilled awesome. I have sent them dozens of customers, they have not failed in any way yet.
I’ve read in other places that the quality of floppies went way down during the last few years of production, even by the big-name brands. My personal experience tracks with this. Before I quit using floppies altogether, the last box that I bought gave me more trouble than all the older floppies put together. I found that the older floppies were still significantly more reliable, despite the age difference.
In particular, there were several times that I would put documents on a floppy (for backup), let the floppy sit around for a few months, and then when I put it back into the same drive that wrote it, I would get the same message as the OP, that the disk needed to be formatted. And I KNEW, that (a) it had been formatted, (after all, it came pre-formatted), and (b), that nobody else had used it and the data that I put on it was still on it.
