Documents saved to Floppy gone missing, can I retrieve them?

[Guest]

Finally persuaded my Father to upgrade to XP with new PC! Old PC ran
Windows98 and he was saving Word/Works docs to Floppy for transferring. He
cut and paste from his My DOcs folder to floppy, changed the disk, did
another batch, and put original floppy back in. (Docs were definately on
disk prior to doing 2nd batch, I checked!). Then got message 'disk not
formatted, would you like to format'. He clicked Yes, thinking it would get
docs back.
Docs still missing, I've searched all drives using 'Find/doc name' searches
and no joy. Not in Recycle bin. Are they sitting somewhere on the
Hard-drive, and/or can I retrieve them from somewhere. Any help gratefully
received.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Finally persuaded my Father to upgrade to XP with new PC! Old PC ran
Windows98 and he was saving Word/Works docs to Floppy for
transferring. He cut and paste from his My DOcs folder to floppy,
changed the disk, did another batch, and put original floppy back in.
(Docs were definately on disk prior to doing 2nd batch, I checked!).
Then got message 'disk not formatted, would you like to format'.

That's probably the media-descriptor byte issue described here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=140060 The way to get around it is to
format a new floppy on the WIndows XP system, then take the new and the old
one to a Windows 98 machine and copy the old to the new there. The new one
should now be readable on Widnows XP.

He
clicked Yes, thinking it would get docs back.

Ugh! That caused the loss of the docs.

Docs still missing,

Now he can presumably read the floppy, but there's no longer anything on it.
Have him do a Google search for an unformat utility. He should use that to
unformat the drive and try to get his files back.

I've searched all drives using 'Find/doc name'
searches and no joy. Not in Recycle bin. Are they sitting somewhere
on the Hard-drive, and/or can I retrieve them from somewhere. Any
help gratefully received.

No, they aren't on the hard drive. The only possibilities are retrieving
them from the original old WIndows 98 PC, if he still has it and they are
still there, or unformatting the floppy, as I suggested above. If neither of
those work, the files are gone.