19th August 2002
For anyone who has ever had a corrupt floppy disk with important data on it, then this tip from Charles McClory is for you. Charles says, "Users come to me with their damaged floppies and I recover the good data from their corrupt floppies 90% of the time without the Norton Disk Recovery program. All I do is insert the bad floppy into the floppy drive, right-click on the floppy icon in My Computer and choose the 'Copy Disk' option. The trick is to keep hitting "Retry" every time it fails; eventually, it WILL work! I have clicked "Retry" 50-100 times to eventually read the entire disk. Then just put in a new, blank, formatted floppy, and Windows will create a duplicate of the original. This even works on floppies for which a directory listing fails. Also, another neat trick I do is 'copy *.* nul' from the command prompt (make sure to type "a:" and press Enter to switch to the floppy drive). This will copy all the files into the 'bit bucket.' The advantage is that it will read all the files and stop on the corrupt ones." Thanks for the tip, Charles! Another trick that I do is run a Scandisk on the corrupted floppy disk. Many a times this has gotten the disk to a readable state so that I can copy the disks to a hard drive and then to a new disk. From there, it is up to you what you do with the corrupted floppy. I have found that most of these disks are OK after a full format.