I haven't been on this forum before, so please excuse me if this has been discussed (in fact, I hope it has). I discovered some old 5.24" floppies with some Word Perfect files that I would like to have. I no longer have the computer (an XT) that I used when I saved the files, but I did pick up a used 5.25" drive and installed it in my older (Win 95) machine. The computer seemed to be reading the drive ok, but it said the disks weren't formated. Now, I'm assuming that is because whatever version of DOS they have is now too old for Win 95. I don't know what DOS they have, but the files are about 10-12 years old. Any suggestions on how I can retrieve the files?

Hmmm. First point: I have a program written in 1979 for the DOS machines back then. This program works perfectly on WindowsXP Pro. All that to say that one of the few pleasures of Windows and DOS is the backward compatibility. The problem with 5.25" drives and diskettes is the formating system. Older 5.25" drives did not format the high density diskettes allowing for 1.2 megabytes of storable data. Based on this there are two possibilities:The drive is an older 360 kilobyte drive and the diskettes are 1.2 megabyte high density types 1)The diskettes are so old that they've lost their formatting 2) The last case happens because the magnetic charge on these diskettes is weak. And 10 to 12 years is a long time to wait to see what's on these disks. Anyone else? Surfer

Yes I have had problems reading old 5.25 floppies. I wanted to load win 3.1 onto an old 486, but the disks were far to damaged. As for your case you might try and changing the size of the of the drive in bios from 1.2mb to 360kb. This should let you read the disks if they still work. What machine were you origonally using these disks on?

Only yesterday I had to convert 360kb 5.25" floppys to 720kb 3.5" floppies. 5.25" disks have not been touched for at least 14 years. Had no problem doing conversion, but ran totally under dos. First blew out 5.25" drive with a hairdryer set to maximum blow and cold, as had not been used for some time and much dust had collected. I suspect you may have a drive problem, as it should not advise discs not formatted, instead when reading I would expect should fail, abort, retry. Surfer made a good suggestion about cpacoity of drive being lower than floppys. Good luck - keep us posted.

Most 5.25 in. beige drives are 1.2 Mo and most 5.25 in. black drives are 360,320,180, or 160 Ko(Tandy had a 320 Ko beige drive in the Tandy 1000).It is easy to clean the magnetic head(s) and dust with a Q-tip and wood alcohol taking care not to bend the magnetic head suspension: remove the small steel covers before attempting this clean-up.The easiest overall ones to use is the 1.2 Mo that let you format all sizes and experiment even with MS-DOS 1.25 on 160 Ko.MS-DOS 6.22 accepts the switch f to change the size from 1.2 Mo.One example: format a: /f:360 /u If you get a message that format won't be done for some reason or if you get too many bad sectors, try a different size and you may correct the problem.Those diskettes being rare items don't throw them away too fast: you can sometimes revive them with a program like Norton Utilities for dos followed by format.Formated sectors on 1.2 Mo diskettes are not at the same position as on a 360 Ko diskettes.Try to find the other size drive if you can to be able to read the floppies. Good luck.

If it's your bios limiting the drive capacity, use the drivparm command in your config.sys to correct this.