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| Thread ID: 12448 | 2001-10-29 05:26:00 | Reaeding data from unformatted floppy | Guest (0) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 22906 | 2001-10-29 05:26:00 | I have critical data which was unfortunately placed on an unformatted floppy disc. In trying to read it, I am ask iof I want to format the disc. Will this destroy the data? How can I access the data (Word files)? |
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| 22907 | 2001-10-29 05:44:00 | If it was unformatted how were you able to copy data to it? And yes formatting the disk will erase the contents. | Guest (0) | ||
| 22908 | 2001-10-29 05:53:00 | If the data are critical be very careful. You must never do anything which will attemnpt to 'correct' or 'repair' the disk. For your first trick, get a pointed object and physically remove the write-enable sliding block so that you cannot write to the disk. Do not format the disk. Do not use Scandisk. Word would not have written to the disk if it was not formatted. It is possible to write to a bad disk, but usually the disk appears OK; you get error messages when trying to read files. Somehow you have got a corrupt file structure. You could try Norton Disk Doctor to see what it makes of it, but do not let it try to fix it, unless you know what you are doing. The old DOS Norton Utility might help you extract the whole disk into a file. Have a browse of the simtelnet site /msdos/dskutils area for some of the old disk recovery programmes. Be happy if you can get just the text, without all the formatting stuff. Good luck. |
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| 22909 | 2001-10-29 06:22:00 | I've had a quick look at simtel, there are two which 'might' help .. msdos/diskutil/drs120.zip and msdos/diskutil/vacuum.zip. If you know someone who has Linux, you might be able to get them to do 'dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/badfloppy.dat bs=512 count=1440'. (This is performed on a disk just inserted in the drive, without being mounted.) This will give a straight copy of every block on the disk. If you are lucky. As a rough indication of your success at this, 'strings -6 /tmp/badfloppy.dat | more' will show you all text words longer than 5 chars ... If that looks encouraging, you could settle down to a lengthy editing session. (You could try this using different values of 'count', because your files will not have filled the disk... | Guest (0) | ||
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