Do old disks just lose their data?

Factual Questions
1

I found some old 3.5" disks of mine from college, and was excited to see what was on them. When I tried to access the disks, my computer told me “The disk in drive A: is not formatted. Would you like to format now?” to which I said no, because I figured that would erase everything… if it hadn’t all been erased already.

I thought perhaps the disks’ many trips through airport x-ray machines and metal detectors during my college years might have somehow damaged the data. But then a few weeks later, a Kodak photo 3.5" disk from 2000 also showed up as “not formatted.” This disk hasn’t moved from my desk in four years.

My disk drive reads everything else, including other disks from college and other Kodak photo disks. Were these affected disks left in direct sunlight? Too close to the computer? Too close to the “magnetic waves” of my VCR (I admit that most of my understanding of science comes from the Star Wars role-playing game)?

I downloaded a data-recovery program and tried it out on the disks, without success. Can the data ever be recovered? Would I have to go to a police crime lab or spend a fortune to do it? And is there a way to prevent this from happening in the future, or should I just transfer everything to CD-ROM’s?

2

Disks can lose data. If the OS thinks they’re not formatted, it is possible that the FAT is corrupted, I suppose. But data could still be recoverable. I’ve never recovered data from a damaged disk, it may take a more sophisticated tool than what you used. If you don’t even know what’s on the disks then it’s probably not worth pursuing.

I think you can even recover data from a disk that has been reformatted, although you were correct to avoid deliberately reformatting a disk that you still wanted to find data on.

X-rays won’t affect disks. I doubt metal detectors would but I don’t know for certain.

Sunlight won’t affect them unless the material is damaged (i.e., melted). Getting a disk too close to a source of magnetism could wipe data–I wouldn’t set it on top of the TV. I put VHS tapes on top of my VCR, maybe I should stop doing that :eek:

There might not be a specific cause. Sometimes disk data just fades, especially on diskettes. I’ve seen this a lot, although what I have seen is bad sectors rather than an apparently unformatted disk.

3

Even CDs can go south after 10-30 (different brands - estimated) years. Still better than a 3.5 and theyre not affected by magnetism.

4

Unfortunately I cannot find any links on google regarding “ageing” of ferromagnetic materials - all I am getting are fatigue measurements of ferroelectric ceramics. But I wouldn’t entirely rule it out that the remanent polarisation of ferromagnetic materials degrades over time, which would be equivalent to data loss.

5

Try accessing the disk from the command prompt. Window’s automatic “not formated” error message isn’t very helpful. If you try to access the disk from the command prompt you should get "failed reading drive A: (r)etry (a)bort (i)gnore. Try retry a few dozen times :smiley:

From my old DOS days I would use the old Scandisk (or actually Norton Disk Doctor) to try to repair the FAT. If that didn’t work it’s pretty much all gone.

6

You can try a floppy recover utility. Norton Utilities used to include such a program. It rewrites the formatting info without destroying the contents (hopefully).

Note that most damage is affect * time. So being in an extra-warm spot for several weeks will ruin a floppy. Or really hot for a few minutes. Ditto magnetic fields, etc.

X-rays themselves aren’t a problem, but the equipment that produces them does produce magnetic fields. So the faster you get them thru the better.

Also try cleaning the floppy drive with a cleaning disk or using a different drive. Some old drives, once they get to a certain point, will ruin any diskette you put in them and should be tossed.

7

Most of my old floppies have gone kaput–and many of them were just sitting around in a desk, not doing anything particularly exciting like going through odd electromagnetic fields. What I did find sometimes helps is trying disks on different computers. I don’t know why this works, but I’ve been able to salvage quite a bit of data by doing this. One disk would work in one computer, then another in a different one, a third in yet another one. It was really odd…none of the computers could read all the disks, yet all put together managed to do relatively okay.

8

I am willing to bet the operating system you are using is Windows XP or 2000. They have had problems reading floppies and they will give you the message you just described. If you go to some Windows message boards and search for this problem you will see several posts regarding this question but no answers.
Many times you can take that disk and go to a Windows 98 or 95 machine and it will read it perfectly (as long as you didn’t format it like the message asks you to).

If you aren’t’ running XP or 2000, then I would say it is something wrong with the disk.

9

Old disks can survive for long periods without problems, and I’d be inclined to think the differences in hardware and software over the decades is the culprit before writing off the disks themselves, especially since you’re speaking of multiple disks and identical results. It’s not like a box of old exposed-but-undeveloped camera film, disks don’t normally go bad in huge batches like that.

I’ve got a box of vintage 1986-91 diskettes with a couple even older 1984-6 floppies I inherited when I bought my secondhand computer, and for every dead disk there are a dozen or more survivors. The first floppy I ever bought and used still works just fine (admittedly it hasn’t spend much of the last decade getting read or written to, but neither have your disks)

Are they high-density diskettes (1.4 MB) or double-density (720K on PC, 800K on Mac)? Or for that matter, single-sided (360/400) diskettes? Keep in mind:

a) Newer computers don’t do a very good job reading DD diskettes. The manufacturers condider them an artifact of the past. (At this point, all diskettes are pretty much an artifact of the past, but to the extent that computers still have floppy drives, HD disks are what the manufacturers anticipates).

b) There was a transition period during which HD disks were available but older computers still in widespread use didn’t know about them. Such computers would format HD disks as DD and could read them. Newer machines would “feel” the extra hole that indicates hi-density and would see the DD-misformatted disk as an unformatted HD disk. To read such disks on a modern machine you need to tape over the HD hole.

c) Many modern computers flat-out won’t read a single-sided disk at all, no matter what. (At least this is true of Macs. The OS stopped supporting the ancient MFS format of single-sided Mac floppies beginning with MacOS 8. Dunno about PCs). If that could conceivably be the case, you may need to find an elderly computer that can still read single-sided disks. (Unlike HD versus DD disks, there’s no hardware indicator on the disk itself to differentiate DS/DD from SS/SD; you could format disks marked either way as either format).

d) Head alignment used to be an issue. You’d get a computer in the computer lab slightly out of alignment and it could format and write to and read its own floppies but would have trouble reading floppies from other computers and vice versa. Some student would come in with a report written at home and would end up having to try 10 different computers before finding one that could read their disk. Try other computers.

e) At the risk of insulting your intelligence: If you were on a Macintosh back then, you aren’t going to be able to read your disks (at least not without some additional software) if you’re inserting them into a PC now. For that matter, there were other flavors of computers back then with floppy drives, types of computers that aren’t still extant. If you were using an Amiga back then and saved your data on native Amiga 880K formatted disks, you aren’t going to read them on a PC or a Mac.

10

I’ll try the disks on a workplace computer, I’ll look carefully at the holes and see if they’re HD disks, and I’ll try accessing them from the command prompt.

I’ll let you know how it works within 48 hours (I know, a lifetime on the SDMB). If nothing works, are there any recovery programs anyone can recommend? Or are these, to put it politely, “complete scams”?

Thanks for your help, and stay tuned…

11

Did I say 48 hours? Because I meant 84. :slight_smile:

Basically, nothing worked. The disks in question are HD, one from '92, one from '93 and one from 2000 (the most puzzling, if you ask me). The command prompt didn’t think there was a disk in the drive at all, and the other computers still wanted me to format the disks.

So, what now? Now do I take it to some kind of “data retrieval” place? Or is there software that’ll do it? Again, one of these is a Kodak disk from 4 years ago that was surrounded by still-functioning disks and CD-ROM’s. Is there any way I kind prevent something like this from happening again?

I await your final words on the subject.

12

If you’re not too concerned with letting some stranger see your disks, you can send them to me.

I still have one of the older versions of Norton that runs from DOS, and has the diskette recovery programs. I’ve had fair success using this on diskettes that give the “The disk in drive A: is not formatted.” error. Although there is frequently some damage that is unrecoverable, often at least some data can be read.

If you want to email me for my address, you can mail the diskettes to me. I’ll take a whack at running them through the recover program and if anything comes up, I can email it back to you, or copy it to new diskettes and send them back. I’m heading out of town on business for week beginning tomorrow, however, so it would likely be 10 days or so before I could look at them.

If you want to try professional recovery, search the web for “diskette data recovery”, you’ll get a bunch of hits. I’ve had crashed hard drives recovered professionally at a cost of $400 to $800 dollars. I would expect a diskette to cost dramatically less, but it might still be a tad expensive.

13

Jason, quite often I have depended upon this nifty software called Bad Copy to recover what seemed like totally blown floppy disks.

There is a free trial version available be sure to check it out. The best part is that this software recovers stuff from various media like floppies, zip drives, flash cards etc. Best of Luck.

14

Try them on a Mac (one old enough to have a floppy drive, of course). Not because Mac floppy drives are inherently better, but they are a bit different and so is the method used by the OS to access the disk contents. I’ve rescued a handful of floppies for PC users (and vice versa: a PC with “MacDisk” running on it, or a Unix equivalent, can sometimes read a Mac-formatted diskette that the Mac considers unreadable or unformatted).

In fact, if you’d like, send them to me and I’ll see what I can get off them. I have an old DOS program (Central Point PCTools) that does very good scavenging on PC-formatted diskettes under VirtualPC.

15

Wow – is there going to be a bidding war for who gets to recover my disks? :wink:

AHunter3 , I appreciate your offer, but I think I’d like to keep the disks west of the Mississippi. Thank you, though – and I may ask for your assistance if RJKUgly’s efforts fail.

I used BadCopy on one of the disks and it didn’t work, by the way.

I’ll put these in the mail once RJKUgly is ready, and I’ll let y’all know how it turns out.

16

I’ve often found that old floppys sometimes don’t rotate very well, which will give the error messages described. If you try to turn the disc manually using a pen (or somesuch similar object) in the offset rectangular hole in the metal bit on the back and it doesn’t move easily then the floppy drive may not be able to turn it. I’m guessing that this happens because the plastic case warps a little or the ‘tissue paper’ inside wrinkles. Solution? Take out the magnetic disc (carefully, don’t touch etc.) and put it in another case.

P.S. Sorry to drag up a dying thread.

17
      • For whatever reason, magnetic floppy disks do seem to lose data over time, in just a few years, even if stored in a cool, shaded location. At one point I bought a 5.25 drive for an older computer I keep around and so far, every 5.25 floppy I have tried to read has had disk errors on it–yet a disk-testing utility used on the floppy drive with a blank disk shows the drive works 100%. -And as a matter of fact, most of the floppy disks that were bad show sector errors, even when reformatted–but they probably didn’t have these errors when they were new, or else they wouldn’t have worked then. So something has obviously happened to them in the 10-15+ years they have been around.
  • Hard drives however do not seem to have this problem. I have hooked up hard drives pulled from computers ten years or more previously (a 14-yr old is my oldest), and had no problems reading from or writing to them. As long as the basic hard drive still worked, all the data was there and scanned as error-free–the time span didn’t seem to have any effect on it.
  • Amazingly enough, CD-R’s can lose data in as little as 2-3 years! Some place in Finland or Sweden did a study in the last year or so that found that different brands of CD-r disks varied widely in how long they would reliably retain data, even when stored properly–and the performance had very little to do with the price of the brand of CD-R (BTW, the gold Mitsui disks are supposed to be the best available).
    ~
18

DougC is correct. Depending on quality of the media and surrounding environment floppies can go bad, and often do.

19

As the density of media has increased over the years, the particle size has decreased and the coercivity has increased. This has allowed more flux changes per inch (FCPI), increasing the amount of data that can be recorded. There is an effect, although I don’t know the proper name for it, which occurs when the recording density is pushed too far for the media, sort of the magnetic equivalent of overclocking. The magnetic domains on the media will move and decay over time. The solution is to reduce the recording density or to use better media. Large domains are stable, small domains are not.

Although they won’t admit it, the manufacturers of floppy disks and floppy disk drives must be cutting a lot of corners to sell them at their current prices. Back in the Stone Age, I used to pay over $50 for a box of 10 8" floppy disks. The disks only stored 250k each, but they were very durable and reliable. Most small computers of that era did not have hard drives. Floppy disk drives were their only mass storage. You could expect to pay $500 for an 8" floppy disk drive.

20

I sent you mail, but just in case you didn’t see it, I’m back from my trip (a couple of days late), and you can send the disks anytime.

If you didn’t get my email, email me again, and I’ll send my address.