Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Resolved Question

Recover Floppy disks

Oct 29, 2011 7:27AM PDT

I have some old floppy disks (about 70) that I created for backup on my old Windows Millenium sytem. There are some old photos I would like to have. I can't open about 1/2 of them on an XP system. Only 1 is physically damaged. All the data recovery people are pretty pricy to recover them ($20. each). The disks have been in the house the whole time. What they say when you try to open them is "do you want to format this disk?" I've tried them on more than on XP system.

There are some software programs that say they can recover your disks. Would they work for this?

bkay

Discussion is locked

bkay has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

- Collapse -
Try NEW floppy drive
Oct 29, 2011 8:22PM PDT

Another solution provided you used an old FD to access those floppies is a NEW FD instead. For the cost of a new FD and/or ext. USB floppy drive may access the problem floppies, excluding true damage.

- Collapse -
New disk drive didn't work
Nov 7, 2011 7:09AM PST
I bought a new USB floppy drive. It didn't work.

However, what it found and didn't find was different than before. In some cases, it would read the name of the files, but say they were corrupted. Others would ask if you want to format. Still another message was that the format was not correct, would I like to format it.

So I guess I'll try one of the programs and if it doesn't work, I'll try to figure out which floppies I have not copied previously and send them off to the recovery people.

Thanks,

Bkay
- Collapse -
(NT) Sorry, to hear of the results
Nov 7, 2011 7:19AM PST
- Collapse -
Answer
Let's be clear here.
Oct 29, 2011 7:35AM PDT
- Collapse -
Answer
Re: floppies
Nov 8, 2011 3:32AM PST

My experience with floppies is that they became unreliable after a few years of storage. After more than 5 years I had to throw away at least half of the stock. That made them rather unusable for backup purposes.

I doubt if a new drive will help, if you already tried on different systems with different drives.

Before spending that 1400 bucks it might make sense to try a few of those programs, especially if they are free to try or have a demo mode.

Kees