Floppy Disc!

[liamvaughan]

i rember reading somewere on how to load your old floppys, well today i come accross the problem and i cant find the website!, basicly the floppy has some inportant files on and was done on a 98 machine years ago, when i put it onto windows xp it asks me to format it as anyone come accross this and if so how do you go about it! thanks

[Michael]

Are you trying to create a boot disk?

[liamvaughan]

Are you trying to create a boot disk?

 

no mate, just load some files off an old floppy

[Michael]

To be honest if it's asking to be formatted I don't believe there's much you can do other than try another floppy drive.

[SC-UK]

Have only looked for thirty seconds and can't find a download for it but have you tried Anadisk?

 

We use it for reading/writing to BBC disks - it will perform a scan of the disk first to determine how it is written and then be able to read it. It may be that if the disk was written long ago then it's only single density, which a lot of modern systems will not read.

 

Tom

[morganw]

If you've still got the drive that originally wrote the disk then try connecting that to give a better chance of the head aligning with the disk properly. Otherwise I would just try it in all the drives you can find (assuming this is a normal double density or high density disk). If it's something exotic like LS120 then you're going to struggle.

[Michael]

LS120, haven't heard that in a while A challenge to ZIP/Jazz drives which lasted about 5 minutes, but then flash drives have pretty much finished off ZIP/Jazz drives.

[6Foot2]

Have only looked for thirty seconds and can't find a download for it but have you tried Anadisk?

 

We use it for reading/writing to BBC disks - it will perform a scan of the disk first to determine how it is written and then be able to read it. It may be that if the disk was written long ago then it's only single density, which a lot of modern systems will not read.

 

Tom

 

Anadisk Links:

 

Index of /dob/files/bleuge/anadisk.207 [Link tested and working]

 

Download Anadisk Full Version Now! [Link tested and working: Sign up required]

[Cmd.exe]

I've had this situation before, the xp machine wants to format the disc - I then put the floppy into a windows 98 machine and the disc read sufficiently well to copy the data off.

We even kept an old 98 machine in the corner just for this purpose.

 

However, that was a little while ago, and with space at a premium in my current school, this would not be practical.

 

On the basis that xp is less tolerant of floppy discs than 98, would linux better at reading the disc?

[Michael]

I'm thinking logically here, but surely it's all to do with the physical floppy drive rather than Windows? Windows only displays what the floppy drive retrieves.

[Arthur]

Floppy disks have always been unreliable. I would be very surprised if you could read any of your disks especially given how old they are.

 

As MorganW mentioned above, drive mis-alignment or even dirty read/write heads are common issues. I would just keep trying the disks in as many FDDs as you can find. If you can find the original drive the floppy disk was written in, even better.

 

You could also try some of the programs mentioned in the two threads listed below, like FlopShow or PhotoRec. I seem to remember having to run "chkdsk a:" a lot when I had problems with floppy disks in the past, but this should only be done as a last resort.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/2499-recovering-files-corrupt-floppy.html

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/7551-floppy-drive-recovery.html

Edited March 9, 2010 by Arthur

[SYNACK]

I agree that floppy disks became much less reliable with Windows XP, we upgraded some machines from 98/ME to XP a long time ago now and had all sorts of hassles with disks. The exact same hardware but XP only ever read disks reliably that had been formatted and used on the same XP level computer.

[R0M]

I wonder if it has something to do with the file system or something, I remember having the same trouble not long ago. I had a 98 machine (not networked) and put some files on a floppy, then took it accross to an xp machine and couldnt read them... I found if i formated it with XP then put it into the 98 machine could both could read/wright with out isue but if i formated it with the 98 box it would not read in xp... odd...

[sonofsanta]

Floppy disks have always been unreliable. I would be very surprised if you could read any of your disks especially given how old they are.

 

Set my old Amiga 500 up last week and all those old 880k DD floppies are still chugging away, was sat happily cross legged playing Wizkid again the other day and grinning like a loon

 

This after maybe 12-15 years of sitting in a cardboard box in my parents loft, not particularly protected from temperature or damp.

 

Also ran a sysinfo tool for giggles, 7.07MHz processor, oh yeah!

[Dos_Box]

It may come as a surprise, but older floppies are actually made to a higher standard that the one we were buying in bulk say 7 years ago. It simply comes down to price. They had to be made cheaper and in larger numbers at the end, which is why many disks from the 80's still work yet ones from 6 years ago don't (that and teh fact that staff and pupils have stored them on top of speakers, microwaves and in vats of carbolic acid.

[ICT_GUY]

Interestingly the other night I was downloading something at 1.4MB/s and I had a moment where it hit me that I was actually transferring data across the phone line at the equivalent speed of a floppy disc per second.

 

I remember when I was well chuffed when I actually had a computer that could hold the entire contents of a floppy in memory.