opening an old floppy???

[mike397]

A friend of mine has created a series of floppy disc's
when she had a windows95 machine,using word perfect???.
She now has windows xp.
When she attempts to open the floppies,and opens them
with either word or wordperfect ,she cannot.
Any help would be appreciated.
Mike

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Can she see the files? If not, the floppy may be corrupted. I would try it
on a different machine.

If she can see the files and copy them to the desktop, it may be that her
current word processing program is not capable of converting them into a
readable format.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone

 

[JAX]

XP will not recognize older formatting of a floppy. I think your best bet
is; find someone who has a pre XP machine and can burn the contents of the
floppies to a CD. Do so and then transfer the contents to the XP machine.

Not to say this is the only, mind you, it is just a suggestion.

HTH JAX

 

[mike397]

Thanks Rick,
I think that's the problem,she can see the files-they just
won't open.
If she copies the floppy to the hard drive ,will she be
able to open them???
Thanks again ,
Mike

 

[~A_Sammy]

I use usb flash disks for moving files around.
It's quick and easy. If both machines have
usb ports, get a USB drive, copy them to it,
and then copy them from it to the XP box.
Small ones, 32 megs, go for about $20. That's
enough to put 30 1.4meg floppies on or 50
of the older ones.

Often times, note pad will open files. It's in
your assories folder. I have word 2002 and
it can open and save files in word perfect 5 format.

Or you can just put word perfect on your xp system.

 

[Gord Dibben]

JAX

I will challenge that statement "XP will not recognize older formatting of a
floppy".

I am able to, with my XP Pro OS, read and access files saved on floppies
formatted on DOS 3.1

Mike

The friend should be cautioned about attempting to open files directly from a
floppy.

If she can see the files, copy them to HDD and then try to open them.
Unfortunately they may have been corrupted by her attempts to open directly
from floppy.

Gord

 

[David Candy]

95/8/ME was a smart operating system. It looked at disks and worked out a lot of the stuff itself (and it was smart with hardware too). With NT it's not so smart and falls over if the detail on the disk is wrong. Likewise MS tried and failed to make NT as smart about hardware, so they gave up. It doesn't matter so much now as most hardware is PnP and the BIOS has gotten smarter. So if the disk is correct it will work (hard or floppy). If incorrect it won't. 98 by comparison just worked out the correct stuff. (there's a kb somewhere that explains how smart 98 is with HD compared to NT - haven't seen it for a few years). Likewise there is one that tells you how to edit the PBR so NT can recognise it..

 

[Ken Blake]

In

XP will not recognize older formatting of a floppy.

Sorry, but this is completely false.

 

[JAX]

Gord,
My statement was based on my own experience after going to XP, as well as
seeing the many problems other posters have had with floppies. All I could
get from a floppy was the dialogue stating that the floppy was not formatted
and an offer to format it.

I tried all of the suggestions people had, including changing my floppy
drive to a brand name, "more accurate", one with no success.

One reply to someone's post offered a link to a web-site, I don't remember
where, that stated there was a formatting issue and offered a logical
explanation, something about some missing "code" or something in older
formatting that XP needed. I threw away some very important floppies based
on that information.

Did you have to do any kind of "tweaking" to your system in order to use
those 3.1 formatted floppies? If so, please reply, in case I find the need
to use an older floppy.

TIA JAX

 

[David Candy]

Debug will fix it. Search the KB - 101061 for Dos shows how to fix for hard disks and has the info for floppies.

 

[JAX]

Thanks David, you have helped me in the past and, once again!

JAX

Debug will fix it. Search the KB - 101061 for Dos shows how to fix for hard
disks and has the info for floppies.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi Mike,

If she can see the files, then the floppy isn't the problem, the files and
the program being used to open them is. She needs to check the possible
converters in her wordperfect program to see if she can open the older file
sets. I would copy them from the floppy to the hard drive before working on
them, just to be safe.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone

 

[Frank]

In


Sorry, but this is completely false.

There is quite a bit of urban ledged tied to these two
subjects. floppy and oem.

 

[Gord Dibben]

JAX

Just lucky, I guess.

No tweaking of XP OS. Plunk in old floppies and XP reads them.

Can copy the files to HDD and am able to use what my current applications
allow.

I've got floppies that were formatted on an 80286 with DOS 3.0

Some may even be from my Tandy 1000EX(1988 8086 vintage). The files dated
1989 probably are.

Yeah, I know, I'm a packrat<g>

Gord

 

[JAX]

Gordon

Thanks for the reply. After doing some experimenting, I came up with the
conclusion that my old floppies were damaged in some way. Shame on me! Not
XP.

I went through a pile of floppies and found that some were usable and some
could not even be formatted. It may be that they were exposed to a magnetic
field or something like that. They were all shipped via UPS along with my
old PC, there is no telling what they went through. The PC was "slam-dunked"
or something so hard it knocked the system speaker out of the little knots
that hold it in place.

I think it is time for me to stop reading other peoples problems with
floppies and go buy new ones for myself!

Thanks again,
JAX

 

[JAX]

I apologize for any misinformation I offered to the group.

JAX