I have taken to writing essays again, and I have been storing documents on a little floppy disc rather than on my PC. Tonight, my disc is not allowing the PC to access any of the 60 or 70 pages of documents on it.
I believe my magnetic keycard, used to gain access to my workplace, may have come in contact with the disc as I usually keep them sort of willy-nilly in my backpack. (That’ll teach me) Unfortunately, it’s the only possibility I’ve arrived at so far.
Does anyone know a way to retrieve the data? Can it be retrieved if the disc was magnetized? I am going to be soooo upset if I can’t get any of this material back.
Here is the error message I get when I try to open the disc
It then gives me the options:
“Retry” or “Cancel”
Please, someone, tell me this is something they’ve done to the PC’s at work. I haven’t tried it on my home PC yet, so I’m still grasping at the hope that this is all some horrible misunderstanding.
If you’re willing to spend some bucks, you might try a data recovery company (www.ontrack.com is one). It probably isn’t cheap, even for a floppy. You could try your system administrator at work- they might have some recovery utilities.
Floppies go bad pretty often all by themselves- you should have at least two backups on different floppies, if the data is important. Since I don’t really trust anything, I like to print out stuff every once and a while, also. I’ve never had to go back to a printout, but at least I know if all else fails, the paper will still work
Arjuna34
I get this problem all the time at the computer help desk. The Norton Utilities has helped people who were actually in tears over their lost data.
The message seems to indicate that the File Allocation Tables were screwed up. This means that the data is still there, but the computer can’t find the information about it to look for it.
Norton Disk Doctor is the first thing to try. It can often salvage the document. It should work to fix the FAT (though there is a chance it may not be able to read the disk at all).
After that, it gets dicey. Assuming you can read the disk, Norton Unerase can sometimes find the fragments, which you can then try to piece together; just unerase everything.
Norton used to have a utility that could search for data throughout the disk (once i used it to recover a 50 page paper that had be deliberately deleted). I think the current version may be able to do it, but I’m not sure.
Once you get the file back, you may not be able to read it in Word. Don’t panic. Try to read it in Wordpad and, if that fails, use Notepad. You’ll lose formatting, but you should be able to find the text in amoung the gibberish.
The first rule of computing is: **Never trust a floppy disk.[/i} Either save your files on two different floppies, or keep a copy on your harddrive or at a place like http://www.freedrive.com
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
Yep, try Norton Utilities Unerase. You didn’t say what operating system you are using so I can’t say what version to use. The old NU should be fine. Or search at download.com for some disk utilities that might do it.
Tiramisu, is a program that reconstructs disks that are like yours. Imight have a copy of it around but you’d need to know 16 or 32 bit & it should be on the net anyway.
“‘How do you know I’m mad’ said Alice.
'You must be, ’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”
No.
I have had a lot of floppys die on me though. And, lest you think I am just lucky, the dead files on floppies/Hard drives ratio in my experience has been tilted hard on the floppies.
/snooty hat on
backing up is not just for cars.
\snooty hat off
There is a program in windows that may allow you to recover some or all of the data. It is called scandisc.
Put the disc into the drive and type scandisc a: from the run box. It will ask you a couple of questions. Be sure to save the damaged data to a file.
It should at least allow you to read the disc and transfer the damaged files onto your hard drive. With luck only a little editing in word will be required
I will try some of the suggestions on my days off this weekend and let you know what happens.
Wonko: I didn’t have the stuff stored on my hard drive because I spend most of my “writing time” at work. Because it’s personal material, and because my boss is a snoop, I keep my documents on disc. Soon to be discs.
Another note on using floppies. I have used some programs that will try to write a file to the floppy, when there wasn’t enough free space. The floppy then had to be reformated for reuse. Check that you have enough space on the floppies before saving.
When the data is only stored on a floppy and is very important, I work with four floppies. Two sets of two. I load the document from a diskette with the most current save. Do my work and save the work to the set with the oldest copies on it. This way you can always go back to the copy that is one work sesson old, if the program does something wrong when it saves the latest document to the floppy set. Both of the diskettes from the newest save would be the same, if the program is causing the problem. Always before you leave try to reopen the newest save to floppy.
This was the method I came up with, when my computer was foppy drive based, and saved me many times. I also had utilities that would read and modify any sector on a floppy, adjust the head reading by a quarter track offset, and allowed me to adjust the rotation speed of the drive. All critical to recovering data from a diskette that wasn’t written to quit right. That utility is not for any current computers.
