[Thinkpad] Re: Off topic: Floppy disk recovery

Hello,

First things first: If you haven't done so already, write-protect the
3.5" floppy diskette by moving the tab in the write-protect notch of the
diskette "up" into the edge of the diskette so you can see through the
hole. This will ensure the floppy diskette does not accidentally get
damaged during your data recovery efforts.

The first thing I would suggest is you try reading the floppy diskette in
as many floppy diskette drives as possible. The reason for this is the
floppy diskette drive in your friend's computer may have drifted out of
alignment to the point where it no longer reliably reads the diskette.
Trying to read the floppy diskette in different floppy diskettes may be
all you need to get the data off the floppy diskette. It may also help
to try accessing the floppy diskette using different operating systems,
such as OS/2, Linux, MS-DOS and so forth.

A good description of floppy diskette drive alignment issues can be found
at <http://www.accurite.com/FloppyPrimer.html>.

If the floppy diskette cannot be read even with different floppy diskette
drives then it's time to try a specialized program. There are several
different types of programs you can use, including sector editors, disk
copying programs, floppy diskette imaging programs and so forth. Most
programs of this type were designed for DOS and haven't been available for
many years, but if you have an old copy of Symantec's Norton Utilities.
Fifth Generation Systems' Mace Utilities or Central Point Software's PC
Tools Deluxe you could try running them against the floppy diskette and
seeing if one of them can read the files on it. You'll probably need to
boot from an original version of MS-DOS (or perhaps IBM DOS or DR-DOS)
and run the program on older hardware, though.

A few programs are still around such as Gibson Research Corp.'s SpinRite
(the disk repair program you mentioned), NTI's AnaDisk and Teledisk
(formerly from Sydex) as are the RAWREAD and RAWRITE programs which I
believe are distributed under the GPL and included with various Linux
distributions. I've used Runtime Software's GetDataBack line of disk
repair utilities with good results on hard disk drives but have never
tried running them on a floppy diskette.

I'd suggest trying SpinRite as the last resort, though, as it writes
to the disk it is trying to recover. It might be best to work with a
Teledisk'ed or RAREAD/RAWRITE'ed copy of the floppy diskette, so the
original one stays safe.

Here are some URLs to the companies mentioned:

GRC Spinrite - <http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm>
NTI AnaDisk - <http://www.forensics-intl.com/anadisk.html>
Runtime GetDataBack - <http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm>
Sydex - <http://www.sydex.com/>
Symantec (owns CPS, FGS and Norton) - <http://www.symantec.com>

Hopefully, between those and a little luck you'll be able to recover all
the files.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

At 07:13 AM 12/10/2004, you wrote:
>Message: 1
>Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 21:34:10 -0600
>From: "David Reid" <dwreid@hiwaay.net>
>Subject: [Thinkpad] Off topic: Floppy disk recovery
>To: <thinkpad@stderr.org>
>Message-ID: <000b01c4de69$1d3b62a0$6401a8c0@dwreid>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
>
>Sorry for the off topic posting but it goes without saying, the TP List is
>such a great resource.
>
>Is there some free utility that can recover data from a standard 3.5" floppy
>disk? I've had the "disk not formated" errors before but I have been asked
>by a friend to try and recover this one as he has some important MS Access
>backup on it.
>
>What about Spin Right (sp?)? Ive heard of it a long time ago but never had
>the need (knock on wood).
>
>Any help would be appreciated here.
>Thanks,
>Dave
>
>---

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Received on Sat Dec 11 04:24:52 2004