I have a floppy disk that is about 1 1/2 years old and I tried to get the data I had on it off, but it will not read.
Everytime I stick it in the drive it says, "Disk is not formatted, would you like to format it?"
How do I read the disk?
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I have a floppy disk that is about 1 1/2 years old and I tried to get the data I had on it off, but it will not read.
Everytime I stick it in the drive it says, "Disk is not formatted, would you like to format it?"
How do I read the disk?
If you didn't format it and it says you need then it's probably a magnet that has screwed it up.
The disk is fine, it has to be. It's been in storage for 18 months.Quote:
Originally posted by Terry
If you didn't format it and it says you need then it's probably a magnet that has screwed it up.
I just tried something I remembered. One time I had this happen to another disk and I just tried it on one of my 3 other computers, and eventually it worked on one of them.
An old 500MHz PC I have sitting over in the corner just read the disk. I cannot open the file, but I can see the file on the disk. The other newer computers I have won't even let me get that far.
Is there something I can run to maybe fix it?
try this.....
put the disk in
and in the dos prompt, "chkdsk a: /f /r"
hopefully that will help.
also, if one of your old comps that you have lying around is an old mac with a floppy drive, try using that, b/c mac's can read pc floppies (msdos/fat32.) I know a lot of comp techs that have an old mac w/ floppy drive around just to do this.
good luck
Everything's alright now. The file was a Microsoft Word file that was corrupted or something. I couldn't open or even see the file with my Win XP PC's. Anyhow, I was able to open it on the 500MHz computer (running ME) in Notepad.exe. All I had to do was piece it together since the format created strange symbols and whatnot.
What's interesting is, I didn't have anything else on the disk but the one word document file... but when I opened it in notepad, I noticed at the bottom of the text, there was stuff typed all scattered about my old printer drivers... weird... cause it's like it was two files in one.
Milo
Floppies are VERY unreliable for long-term storage. Before CD's became a popular storage medium and all software came on floppy, it was actually fairly common to get some bad ones right out of the box!
If you've got files that are worth saving, put them on something -- anything -- other than a floppy disk.
I agree. I don't use them anymore... but this was information that I kept up to date on this floppy over the course of a few years. I use only CD-R and CD-RW media now.Quote:
Originally posted by SkyDog
Floppies are VERY unreliable for long-term storage. Before CD's became a popular storage medium and all software came on floppy, it was actually fairly common to get some bad ones right out of the box!
If you've got files that are worth saving, put them on something -- anything -- other than a floppy disk.