I lost my data I saved on floppy?

Question

I saved some email messages on a floppy disc and brought it home from work and went to look at them on my computer at home and when I tried to open the floppy it said disco not formatted would you like to format now yes no. Have I lost my data? What should I do?

they are no longer in my email. just on floppy. If i take it back to work will it work there it did the other day.

Answer 1

Hi there:

You have probably NOT lost any data.
Floppy copy and read problems are VERY common, and people have forgotten how to use them and maintain them.

I looked at the two other answers before mine. The first states that you lost everything. _ WRONG !!
The second states that you are using a different operating system ( WRONG -- a floppy is a floppy is floppy unless you are using a MAC vs PC, and even you would be smart enough to know that they are differnt !)
[[ Another rare situation is where you are using an OLD, 3 1/4 inch floppy on one machine, and a "new" 3 1/4 inch floppy drive on another machine, since the DRIVES Themselves, are different FORMATS ( the operating systems ( DOS, WIndows would be the same, and understand both formatting systems, but the mechanical heads and tracks are different ! ) There a dozens of different Floppy read/writers, and different FORMATs and sizes. The first IBM PC shipped with no harddrive, no floppy, and 16K of ram. There was a big DIN plug identical to the old keyboard plug, that you plugged in a cable that went to your Audio Cassette player, to load programs.. Then came the full height, single sided, low density, 5 1/2 inch floppy, then the high density, then the low density, two sided floppy, then the two sided High density floppy. Then all of these were replaced with the LOW density 3 1/4 inch floppy, and later the High Density 3 1/4 inch.
IFF you have a normal, modern 3 1/4 inch HIGH density disk writer at the office, and try to use it in the ancient 3 1/4 LOW density disk unit at home, the older low density machine will not know what the tracks on the floppy are - it will be reading two tinier high density tracks at the same time and get garbage data.
The odds of you having a 720 K floppy Machine at home, and a 1.44 Meg floppy Unit at work, are almost zero, but I thought I would mention it ! ) ]]
The second answer states to but the floppy BACK in the orginating comptuer, and this actually WOULD have a high success rate.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO " NOT " scandisk, or defrag or touch the floppy in ANY WAY.
Make your disk ' holy " at once, and prevent any writing of any kind, by flipping the little tab down so that BOTH HOLES on the corners are open ( holy disk ), so that your disk is protected from evil ( programs that WRITE or try to repair it- which would destroy YOUR data in the process of " repairing " the tracks -- they do not give a hoot about YOUR data, only in re-viving the useability of the disk -- BEWARE ! ! )

There are many precautions in using floppies. The first, is to ALWAYS FULL FORMAT ( not the silly "quick format" ) the disk before writing to it, even if it is NEW and out of the package...

The other problem is the LACK of use of ordinary floopy drive machines. They continually build up layers of dust, and when people DO go to use them, they gum up the heads with dirt. There are floppy cleaner disks available at most computer stores and dollar stores, and you SHOULD clean them if they have not been in use very much...

Another problem is the slight variation in the HEAD size, and the HEAD alignment, of different floppy macnines. You can get slight differences in technologies, track sizes, and trach placements, and although they "work" in other drives, the floppies used on one machine may be just a bit off-center written, and cause intermeittent read/ write errors.

Finally - HOW TO RECOVER THE DATA

When you erase something, the data is still there. DOS/ WIdows systems just take the first letter of the NAME of the file on the directory look up index on the outter rows of the disk, and change it to a "? " mark. This gives the system permission to write new data on top of the old files.

You have not erased or written anything on top, so that you just have to be able to READ the data that is already there.

If the floppy blank that you used is defective, with BAD BLOCKS or areas of the disk that will not magnetize, then when you WROTE the data, there may be tiny areas of the data that are lost. THE WORST place for this to happen, is in the DIRECTORY, outer tracks, since this is where the computer looks to see what fiels are on the disk. If there is a problem in the outer tracks, the computer will refuse to look further.

There are programs that IGNORE standard look-up procedures, and just scan the entire disk anyway, and look at what is there.
The programs examine the valid data, and fill in any bad sectors or bits, to give you a COMPLETE file, that DOS/WIndows can see, and use. It may have a bit of garble in TEXT , for example, where the repair program filled in missing computer binary Zeros and Ones to make what DOS/ WIndows " sees" as a ' complete' file, but most of the data you want would be there.

The Method I would use would be :
1/ WRITE PROTECT YOUR FLOPPY IMMEDIATELY ! (holy disk)
2/ use a floppy cleaner in your home machine, and insert and re-insert the disk to see if by luck you get a good alignment.
3/Take the flappy back to work, and again, use the floppy cleaner, and insert - re- insert hoping to get a single, valid READ. If you get a read, back it up on the harddrive, and get a new floppy, reformat it, and make a new copy.
4/ At home or office, use the utilites below - there are FREE download " trials" and a completely FREE download repair utility that has very high ratings.

Next time, Full format first. Use a floppy cleaner disk. Make a backup of the backup!

Here are the links:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinspector.html
FREE - Excellent ratings !!!!

http://www.howtodothings.com/computers/a3773-how-to-recover-floppy-disk-data.html
Tips on USING floppies, and 3 PAY for programs $40 to $70


http://www.bmtmicro.com/BMTCatalog/win/recoverfixedfloppy.html
3 PAY FOR programs about $20

You should have your data back in short order!

Hope this helps

robin

Answer 2

I think that you did not lose the data, and only the file system on the floppy has been corrupted, so you can't open it normally, my memory card have same problem, I search some software and use freeware recovered some files, you can try it, I don't remover the software name, maybe it is on this link:http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm

Answer 3

I sincerely suggest you not format your disc or you'll lost your messages.
Mostly formatting can wipe all your data. Though you can once again use it, but nothing could get back on your disc.How to get your RAW massages back?
I suggest you an easy software that may help you. It seems to be easeus data recovery wizard or pro

Answer 4

No you haven't lost your data. The reason it says that is because chances are you used a different OS when you saved them to when your were trying to open them. Go back and email them to yourself, this way it won't encrypt a certain OS that you have to use. Then download the attachments to your home computer.

Answer 5

theyre gone