After reassembling my homebew PC in a new case, I booted up the machine and noticed that the diskette drive light remained on. A quick check revealed that I had reconnected the diskette drive's signal cable the wrong way. I also noticed that I had left a diskette in the drive, and because of the cable inversion the diskette's contents had somehow become corrupted to the point of my being asked, "Do you wish to format this diskette?" To make sure the drive was working properly after reconnecting the cable the right way, I tried another diskette. Success! But what about that poor diskete that fell victim - is there any way to salvage its contents?

http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/ Computer Components

Try it in another system/drive, just to be sure

Hi, Reversed ribbon cable does not damage the drive, but does blow any disk in the drive. I don't remember trying to fix one. I would run something like SCANDISK in THOROUGH mode. If Scandisk likes it then run C:>SYS A: from C: and FDISK A: to make it bootable. Luck, Jim

I think he just wants to save the data Jim...I also think he has little chance unless he goes to a pro. Skip

Hi Skip, My crystal ball told me that he was trying to boot a new system and that the floppy was probably a bootable of some sort. If I remember correctly the boot files are the only thing corrupted with the cable reversed. Seems that what I told him would be the best chance of success and would not damage the data on the disk. I have many yrs of tech support experience. You learn to guess what is being said. Jim