Ive been doing some invoices on my pc (running xp) and saving on my floppy. I came to looking into my a drive today and it says disc needs to br formatted but on the oustide of the floppy it says its formatted. From previous experience i know that formatting will delete everything on the disc. Is there a way around this where i can retrieve my files from the disc. please please help my jobs at stake!!!

Hi, I have had that problem before and most of the time it has been a dirty drive. Try buying a diskette drive cleaner and see if that helps. Ray

You could try reading the floppy in another floppy drive, but it usually doesn't help. You are probably getting that message because the boot sector and/or the FAT (file allocation table) on the floppy is damaged, often because it is on a bad sector. You may need to try a utility such as Norton Disk Doctor (it's in Norton System Works these days) or some other data recovery utility - it doesn't matter how old it is for a floppy disk - a Dos utility will do. There are two identical copies of the FAT (file allocation table) on the floppy - these utilities can often restore the proper FAT from the second copy, if the second FAT is not also damaged. What you are experiencing is common these days. It stems from the fact that floppy disks these days are often not subjected to the quality control checks they used to go through in the past. The floppies are often mass formatted without checking them for bad sectors, or they are simply defective. They appear to be perfect when you first get them, but in reality there are bad sectors on them, or they develop bad sectors on them in a short time. The only way to get around this is to use older floppies if you can - more than three years old or so - or in any case, to do a FULL format of the floppies before you use them. FULL format (RIGHT click on A: to find Format) is slower, but it is very good at finding and excluding from use any previously undetected bad sectors on a floppy, a common problem these days. If you choose to format in Dos (or Win XP), DO NOT use the Quick format switch, for the same reason. In Win 9x, ME you get a summary after the formatting is finished by default, and you will see right then if you have bad sectors on the disk. In Win XP, you must look at the Properties of the floppy after it is formatted to see if it has bad sectors (RIGHT click on A: to find Properties). If it is a new or recent disk, I recommend you throw it away if it has bad sectors, because in my experience there's a good chance it will only get worse. That doesn't protect you from a recent disk that develops bad sectors in a short time, despite it formatting without bad sectors being found initially. In that case make two copies of everything you put onto floppies, or make backups of the floppy contents on a hard drive. e.g. I recently bought two boxes of ten MEMOREX floppies - 16 of them FAILED the FULL format in Windows (at least some bad sectors), one of which was found to be not formatted, Windows formatted it, and found lots of bad sectors. This problem is not exclusive to MEMOREX floppies - they have just been the worst one in my experience, I don't buy a large variety of brands, and it is more convenient for me to buy that brand nearby (at WALMART). I have about 70 floppies of various brands that have not passed the FULL format in Windows with no bad sectors that I have collected in the past three years or so - about twenty of those developed bad sectors AFTER the Windows FULL format initially found none - a few, maybe 5, were so defective Windows could not format them. On the other hand, when I run Full format on floppies older than about three years that passed without bad sectors previously, maybe one in a hundred is found to have developed bad sectors.

I hadn't heard about modern floppies - I have a drawer full from before I retired and doubt if I shall ever need to buy them again. I do, however, have a suspicion about modern floppy drives being poor, so it could just be worth trying them in another, preferably older, drive if available. The other side of this coin is to check whether it is only one disk that cannot be read - perhaps the drive has failed and not the disk? I hope that you can find a recovery utility that will work, but then PLEASE rethink how you are storing your data and what arrangements you should have in place for backup.