Problem with floppy disk

Rookie

A friend of mine has been using a floppy for a few years to keep some club records.

Recently she tried to use the disk and found her files were not accessible. A message saying disk not formatted appeared and asked if she wished to format.

Has she now lost all her files?

The disk is labelled with the files concerned so she has not picked up the wrong disk.

albertross_2

Floppy disks are not a good storage medium, you could try running chkdsk a: /F
on it

Conor_3

Rookie wrote: »

A friend of mine has been using a floppy for a few years to keep some club records.

Recently she tried to use the disk and found her files were not accessible. A message saying disk not formatted appeared and asked if she wished to format.

Has she now lost all her files?

The disk is labelled with the files concerned so she has not picked up the wrong disk.

Quite probably. Floppy disks are THE WORST form of storage media. The drive heads become out of alignment and the disks can be corrupted by change in temperature, humidity, magnetic sources - pretty much anything. They don't last long either. If she's been using the same disk, she's done well to have it last this long.

It's toast.

Stompa

If possible, try reading it on a few other PC's - you may get lucky.

OddjobKIA

if she said yes to wanting to format it then YES sorry.

Stephen_Leak

For the love of God, do NOT re-format it. If anything will lose the data for ever, this is it.

Running the "Checkdisk" utility and trying it in other drives are good ideas.

I would add giving the disc drive head a clean, using one of those cleaning kits.

richyrichuk

also if the data was written from the same OS it has problems reading it back. so if u stored it from a win 98 pc. then try and use it in win xp. there are known issues between them.

just get a USB pen drive.

4 GB £20

like over 1,500 times more data can be fitted on this. and safer. but of this size make a backup of your backup.

Rookie

Thanks to all. Disk had been tried on 4 machines to no avail.

I got out an old laptop with Win95 OS and lo and behold it read the disk. I copied contents onto a DVD and my friend is now very happy!!
I also made another floppy which read ok.

albertross_2

I'd tell them to use the FD for backup, and save the main file on the HD.

Garetha

Rookie wrote: »

Thanks to all. Disk had been tried on 4 machines to no avail.

I got out an old laptop with Win95 OS and lo and behold it read the disk. I copied contents onto a DVD and my friend is now very happy!!
I also made another floppy which read ok.

Phew!

Perhaps a lesson to us all to use backups.

"a backup is what you do after you've lost some data"

Rookie

Yes!!! But when I found the files....guess what...... she had back ups of some files on the same floppy.