Help! I Can't Retrieve Data From one of my Diskettes

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Greetings computer experts.

A problem has come up lately with one of my diskettes in that I can't retrieve its contents any more.

When I try to open it through MSWord, I get this message saying:

Data error (cyclic redundancy check), then I click OK

The next message comes up:
'A:\' is not accessible. The disk media is not recognized. It may not be formatted.

Then, I tried clicking the My Computer icon, and then the 3 1/2 Floppy A: icon, and got this message:
The disk in drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

I tried clicking yes but got this message saying formatting it now will cause you to lose ALL data, so I clicked Cansel.


This diskette contains some of the book that I am writing and I can't afford to lose that info. I welcome any advice on any techniques there may be to salvage all that. Thank-you in advance.

floppies are the work of the devil

the crc error means you are screwed

you could pay someone a great deal of money to try to recover the data (don't expect them to be successful)


death to the floppy
chant it from the rooftops: death to the floppy

Yeah, don't rely on Floppies for anything! They are junk! If yo need to store on something, use either CDR, CDRW, Zip disks, or USB key drives.... anything is preferably to a floppy.

This MAY work. Try any combination you can

1) Different floppy drives are slightly different. Try the disk on a series of pcs like at the library. One may work.

2)If #1 happens to work you MAY even access it in word.

3) If #1 happens to work but word still won't open it, try notepad. If that fails use the dos type line command to copy the file bit by bit. By going backwards to primitive systems you can sometimes bypass the integrity checks etc.

4) If 1-3 fails try a free trial download of a file recovery program. Most have instructions you can download any of several from: http://www.snapfiles.com/Shareware/syst ... overy.html

5) There PC you worked on last may have a copy of the file in its temp directory. Most likely if you worked on it in the last few days.

6) If you ever e-mailed it to a friend check the sent folder of your e-mail.

julie

Sorry cant help.

But USB keys are definately the way to go these days. As you will find, most new computers dont even come with floppy drives anymore. I can see why, they are just too unreliable. USB keys are pretty cheap these days too.

Whats a floppy, I asking my sister since she uses her floppy if she had any problems like this.

I hope I can Help You.

Run scan disk or spinrite on the floppy and see if that does not fix it.

Well, if you made the used the floppy on a Mac first, it won't work on Windows. Cross-platform floppy OS issues have plagued schools for years. It sounds like you formatted it for a different OS, problem I don't know a way around other than e-mailing files to yourself through the computer you usually use.

Need to reboot your computer so you can retreive from your disk.
If the information on the disk has not been compromised the information will not be lost by rebooting.

You may also want to try it on another computer as well. I had a CD Rom That was giving me a Cyclic Redundancy Error, and I thought that I was screwed due to a bad disc.

I tried it on another computer, and pulled the stuff that I needed from it with no problem.

Thank-you all for the advice, ladies and gentlemen.

I haven't been able to retrieve anything from that one diskette and it doesn't appear to be salvageable. However, I did transfer everything on all other diskettes to CD-ROMS and threw the diskettes in the trash. Like some of you say, they are trash.

Its to bad that you could not get the infomation off your disk.

You could use a hackers cd like flack: http://www.phlak.org and the forensics tools to copy the raw data and then see what you can salvage.

jb814,

Thank-you so much for the link. I've got it bookmarked for now and will study it more when I have time. There seems to be some pretty interesting stuff in there.