floppy disk issues

[nappyrat]

so i opened my floppy disk folder, which was full of inportant text documents, and to my surprise it was all gone. i cant see any of my files, but in the pie chart, it shows that 833 Kb is used up. there's only one file in there and i cant delete it, i checked the proporties and it seems to be empty and has a size of 0kb. when i delete it, it comes back. once before a while back i got a msg about "corrupt" files, and i have noooooo clue on how to fix this. can someone help me restore my text files? im so lost!

[Tim_axe]

Since I'm assuming that all of your text documents were in Plain Text (*.TXT) format, I'm fairly confident that they can be recovered. DO NOT, I repeat, do not try to add new files to this floppy disk otherwise it might overwrite your data. On a floppy disk, recovery should be easier since there is only 1.44MB to recover instead of several GB...

Now, go to www.theabsolute.net/sware/ and download Disk Investigator. This program can find files that you deleted. And it is free. Although it usually finds the files, there is a low level mode where you can scan the entire floppy disk for most data on it.

After it is installed, fire it up. Select your floppy drive, and then see if your files show up. If they do, select them and find "Undelete." It is probably in the file menu, but might also be at other places depending on what is selected. Undelete them to your C: drive, so your floppy disk isn't changed. Note that some files might be slightly or even majorly corrupt, but if they were not overwritten they might be intact.

If they do not show up, you will have to go into a lower level mode and view the entire Disk. Go to View -> Disk. Now you will see all sorts of symbols in the display area. The middle colum is the text, and should show text from your files if you are in the right sectors. Make use of the scroll bars going up and down, and the start of disk - end of disk scroll bar on the bottom. Try to copy and paste what you find into a new text file on your C: drive. BTW, all those symbols are HEX on the left of the middle, decimal values on the right side, and the far left is offset from the start of the disk in bytes...

Good luck, and I hope you can get those texts back okay.

-Tim_axe

[nihil]

Hi,

First I would try:

1. Buy a floppy disk drive cleaning kit and use it.

2. try the floppy on other computers, if you find one that will read it, immediately make a copy.

[nappyrat]

thanks for your advice guys. ill get to it asap

[nappyrat]

ouch, so i got the program, when i try to use directory mode "cannot read directory" and inevitably no files showed up. so then i went to disk mode and i only got back a very very tiny amount of data (maybe a paragraph's size total). what other things can i do with disk investigator to get all of my data back? thanks in advance

[Tim_axe]

Hrm... I'm sorry to say that I don't really know how to fix this problem. Is your Floppy drive a USB Floppy drive? I don't think that Disk Investigator liked my USB 2.0 Harddrive, so if it is USB you should look for a cheap internal one or borrow a friend's computer or something. But if that isn't the problem, I don't really know what else you can do to view the rest of the disk... There might be programs out there that can view lower level information than Disk Investigator (If the file system / format is corrupt Disk Investigator might not work, which may be the case for you), but I don't know if they will work or not for you. You might have to find trial software and test it out to see if anything else can help you out or not.

Good luck, but I'm not sure how much further you can go from here...

[nappyrat]

thanks for ur help anyways, a couple of people have sent me some file recovery programs. ima go check em out and see what they can do for me.