Zip Drive Problems

Hey guys it's been a while since I've posted on here but it's the first place I thought to go with a problem my neighbor is having.

He has a 250mb zip disk with 4 years worth of data on it. Every time he puts it into a zip drive at work he gets an error saying the disk is not formated. However, if he puts any other disk in the drive the drive recognises it and works fine. He's tried the disk in several machines and they have all given him the same error. Does anyone have any clues that might help me find a way to get the data off the disk so we can burn it onto a CD for him? I'm currently in the process of trying to find a friend with a 250MB zip disk so that I can try to access the information on my home computer to burn it for him.

Let me list some of the things I've thought of.

*All the computers are the same with the same specs, there's a chance new computers were brought in since the last time he's used the disk and so he might unknowingly be putting a 250mb disk into a 100mb zip drive. Would this cause that error?

*I've heard of errors that people have gotten when they've tried to write-protect zip disks however I've never had to use a zip disk so I'm not sure of the problems. Does anyone know of any potential write-protection errors that would cause the above unformatted error?

Crap, I've got to run real quick but any help or things I might want to check out would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
sicko

the disk may have some corrupt data on it, run scandisk on it

That sounds like one of the 250MB zip disks that I have. I have tried other 250MB zip disks and they all work perfectly fine, except for this one. It almost sounds like it has some corrupt data on it. I agree with muisejt, try to run scandisk on it to see if it has any errors on it.