Can't read Floppy Disk

[Mulligan]

I copied a file to a new floppy disk and it seemed fine. Now I tried to use
it to put back in the data from it and the computer can't read it. The
green light just stays on and makes a lot of noise. Is there any other way
to retrieve the data, it is important. thanks

 

[user]

I copied a file to a new floppy disk and it seemed fine. Now I tried to use
it to put back in the data from it and the computer can't read it. The
green light just stays on and makes a lot of noise. Is there any other way
to retrieve the data, it is important. thanks

Sometimes you can take a marginal floppy disk to another floppy drive
and it will read it. That assumes that the data was written to the
floppy in the first place. If it can be read on another FDD, you can
often write another disk and it might be read on your old drive.

Ken

 

[Mulligan]

Thanks Ken, I did that. I tried to put the data on my friends computer (it
is an Excel File). when it would not open or send the file I brought it
home to try on my computer. same problem. Any other suggestion?

 

[philo]

I copied a file to a new floppy disk and it seemed fine. Now I tried to use
it to put back in the data from it and the computer can't read it. The
green light just stays on and makes a lot of noise. Is there any other way
to retrieve the data, it is important. thanks

since you *copied* a file to the floppy

just throw throw the floppy away and don't bother with it

then simply recopy the file to a new floppy

if the problem happens again, there may be a problem with you floppy drive

 

[Vanguard]

Could be the original floppy drive you used is out of spec and the
tracks written by it will not match up with other in-spec floppy drives.
In this case, you need to replace the $10 floppy drive that is
out-of-spec (i.e., worn or just plain bad). Sometimes the out-of-spec
will still write to a floppy formatted on an in-spec floppy drive.
Format a floppy on one of the *other* floppy drives, take it to the
machine where you copied the file, copy the file on this pre-formatted
floppy, and then see if it can be read on other floppy drives. If the
floppy was pre-formatted out of the box and that's what you copied onto,
it's possible the vendor screwed up with out-of-spec mass production
equipment (so a huge batch of badly pre-formatted floppies are out
there), so try formatting the pre-formatted floppy to see if it then
works. If it's one of those specialty super high capacity floppies that
use laser marks to separate sectors and require specialty drives to read
them then you probably cannot format those; they need to be
pre-formatted by the manufacturer who is putting the laser marks on the
floppy. I've never used that type of media. I suppose in another 3
years the CD-RW drive will become the ubiquitous replacement for the
floppy drive.

 

[Andrew Hall]

I recently had the same problem and there are a number of recovery programs
available as either shareware or demo's. The one I used which recovered my
data is R-studio at www.r-tt.com or via tucows.

Andrew