Rescue MSDOS broken floppy disk?

[iconfly]

My friend saved her 4000 word essay to a floppy disk, MSDOS.
:oops: When she went to open it Win told her disk was not formatted,
"would she like to format it now", she coose yes! :( Does anyone have any suggestions if Knoppix can rescue the data from the disk? I guess Norton is not the answer if it could not be recognised. Does Knoppix have a suitable disk editor/viewer that would work. Thanks in advance. Jimmy

[oscar]

www.google.com

search for floppy unformat

good luck

[monkeyman]

These freeware programs should be able to help you out.
http://www.pricelessware.org/2003/PL2003FILEUTILITIES.htm#UndeleteTool

[iconfly]

Thanks to you both, I am afraid the floppy was beyond rescue, she had to retype her essay! Live and learn.
Jimmy. :lol:

[Henk Poley]

My friend saved her 4000 word essay to a floppy disk, MSDOS.
:oops: When she went to open it Win told her disk was not formatted,
"would she like to format it now", she coose yes! :( Does anyone have any suggestions if Knoppix can rescue the data from the disk? I guess Norton is not the answer if it could not be recognised. Does Knoppix have a suitable disk editor/viewer that would work. Thanks in advance. Jimmy
SpinRite might do it. See if somebody owns a copy (some unis do). It's a kind of wierd disk scan program. Some people say the 'detect disk failure before it happens' hypothesis is just nonsense. On the other hand, even if it doesn't detect beforehand, his programs reads the defective sector a lot (1000 times according to the docs) before saying it has recovered all data, so I think it could indeed do wonders. I've never had the change to test it.


Thanks to you both, I am afraid the floppy was beyond rescue, she had to retype her essay! Live and learn.

But indeed, 4000 words aren't that much to retype. :-P

[Henk Poley]

www.google.com

search for floppy unformat
That should only help when you accidentaly formatted your floppy. Bad sector stuff won't be recovered.

[garyng]

I just wonder why people nowadays still use floppy as 'backup' ? Even a free account on yahoo can give one quite some storage for this kind of backup and may be even safer than CD-R.

[Henk Poley]

I just wonder why people nowadays still use floppy as 'backup' ? Even a free account on yahoo can give one quite some storage for this kind of backup and may be even safer than CD-R.
Sometimes you may not store *anything* on the harddisk. So then Yahoo probably isn't handy (nowhere to temporary store the file). Unless there is a way to mount the drive (under Windows), something like "webfolders". But that doesn't always work at all machines, as I've experienced.

[garyng]

Sometimes you may not store *anything* on the harddisk. So then Yahoo probably isn't handy (nowhere to temporary store the file).

I can understand situation like this but given that, I would definitely carry a USB CF reader or thumb drive. And if it is not an option(that must be some very old machine running 98 ) and a floppy is a must(evil), first thing first is to read the whole thing out once I have a chance.

I never trust data on a floppy for more than 24 hours.

BTW, how can window control the writing to a temp directory of a machine ?

[Henk Poley]

Sometimes you may not store *anything* on the harddisk. So then Yahoo probably isn't handy (nowhere to temporary store the file).
I can understand situation like this but given that, I would definitely carry a USB CF reader or thumb drive. And if it is not an option(that must be some very old machine running 98 ) and a floppy is a must(evil), first thing first is to read the whole thing out once I have a chance.
Ever seen a PC on schools/unis with USB sockets on the front? And what about Solaris machines (Sun Sparcs), got lots of them where I go. But indeed you can use your


BTW, how can window control the writing to a temp directory of a machine ?
Not really, but you can stop general 'open' and 'save as' boxes from accessing the temp (or any) dir, by simply hooking these DLLs and letting it refuse to do something.

[cascadefx]

SpinRite might do it. See if somebody owns a copy (some unis do). It's a kind of wierd disk scan program. Some people say the 'detect disk failure before it happens' hypothesis is just nonsense. On the other hand, even if it doesn't detect beforehand, his programs reads the defective sector a lot (1000 times according to the docs) before saying it has recovered all data, so I think it could indeed do wonders. I've never had the change to test it.


Having had experience with SpinRite... it probably would do the trick. It is pricey, though. I got a copy for $100 bucks (educational price) for a single floppy.

Spinrite is amazing at recovering data on lost (click of death, etc) ZIP disks as well. It can take a long time though (24 hours to recover 50MB of lost data).

Does anyone know of an Open Source tool that does similar tasks? Fixing damaged disks using low level scanning techniques?

Thanks