Hi, 720Kb would have only one square hole and that in the upper left corner. 1.44 Mb will have another hole in the upper right corner to tell the floppy drive what size disk is inserted. Any modern floppy drive will automatically adjust for the 720 and read/write it. I doubt there is any 3 1/2" hard case floppy that can't be read with no changes to the system. I used up all my 720s sending files home with friends that don't bring disks with them. Good Luck, Jim

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I`m sitting here in my computer room looking at my Smith Corona Personal Word Processor made in 1991 which reads, and writes using 3.5" double density double sided diskettes. If there is anything I can do to help you out, give me a shout. Regards IKE

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Ike Peters seems to have the best solution, it's great when people help eachother out in computing.net Hopefully my advice will help you...Please post back with your results....thanks

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I just tried a formatted 720kb floppy in my 1.44mb drive - it is recognized fine, without having to do anything special. As JimPM says, all 1.44mb drives I know of will automatically recognize a 720 floppy properly. I suspect that either Brother used formatting and/or partitioning that is not compatible with Microsoft's, or the floppies you have tried have deteriorated to the point they can no longer be read properly. I think the former is more likely - I have found old floppies are a lot more reliable than more recent ones over the long term.

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Thanks, guys. Although it wasn't suggested as a good idea, I did change the BIOS to treat my standard floppy drive as a 720KB floppy drive. As Stuart said, this made no difference when reading the disks, I still got the "Do you want to format this disk now?" message. I went to My Computer (under W2K) and the 3 1/2 floppy drive changed to a 5 1/4 floppy drive. I right clicked it and clicked Properties and beside File System it said Unknown. So since these disks are formatted using a file system unknown to Windows, I wonder if there is any freeware application that would read binary data from the floppy disk regardless of the file system format? I'm thinking of something like the Disk Reader found in the HexSource/Frhed hex editor but would be for floppy drives. Any more help would be much appreciated. You may wonder why I'm wanting to do this, but I don't have the word processor any more, and I wanted to see if reading the old disks that I have is possible to do on a desktop pc.

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I really think the Media Descriptor Byte may be the reason. You can check the link to the previous thread I mentioned above or try to read the disk with an earlier OS as XpUser4Real said. Even then, as already mentioned, the disk may be formatted in a way that windows doesn't recognize. Or it may see the disk OK but be unable to open its files because windows doesn't recognize the file types.

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A few years ago when I was still using Windows 98, I had tried to read the disks but still got the same message about it asking if I would like to format or not.

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I would have thought 98 would have seen the disks. Assuming they're OK, this place: http://www.luxsoft.demon.co.uk/lux/bconv.html will convert disks for a price. Even if you're not interested in doing that, the link contains info on the file types and compatibility. Someone who's already tried. And some Google search results You may be able to find the conversion software cheaper on ebay. Or add the word freeware or shareware to the google search.

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Oh, I get it("finally"), it`s not about you have important info on these disks, and you need to get the info off these disks for an important reason, which is what I had interpreted. It`s just something to try, like an exercise for the gray matter/ to see if it can be done.

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It is possible that they are 1.44 disks formatted to 720k by the word processor, I had this some time back and had to cover the hole n the 1.44 disk and then windows recognised it as 720k, its worth a try!! HTH Woof Always proof-read carefully to see if you any words out.

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Woof, I do that all the time to format 720 floppies as they are real hard to come by and I still need 720's on an old Atari that I use for editing midi files.. You gave a great answer! Hopefully my advice will help you...Please post back with your results....thanks

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Comes from having an Amiga 1200 :) I bought a box of 100 brand new Inmac disks a while back, must have 50 left still. Woof Always proof-read carefully to see if you any words out.

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If you're only using a 720 drive there's no need to cover the disk sensor hole since the drive has no 720/1.44 sensor.

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That`s correct, I only have to cover the hole when i try and read them on the PC. The Amiga formats them to 720k with no worries. I did once go to teach someone that phoned the company where I worked to use her computer, Got there and it was a Canon (I think) dedicated word processor!! I thought bugger! then she asked me if I would like a cup of tea, I said yes and while she was making it had a quick flip thru the manual, discovered it used ms dos file system on its floppies and so just brushed up on the dedicted commands used by the system, she was happy she could at last actually use it :) Woof Always proof-read carefully to see if you any words out.

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Woof, thanks a lot for the response! However, the disk is labeled as 720KB.

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Then it is either fubared or not in msdos format Woof Always proof-read carefully to see if you any words out.

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Is there any program that can read hex data from a floppy disk (like the file system of the disk)?

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You can use debug to read/write absolute sectors via BIOS. Problem is, the BIOS won't know how a "non-PC / non 720~144" FD is sectored. ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

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Old norton utilities for dos had diskedit that would read and write hex but as M2 says it may be meaningless if it's a non-dos disk.

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I have a Brother WP2400 sitting behind me right now. It's not possible to retrieve the data from those disks at all, sorry to bring the bad news definitely, but I know it for a fact. For a long time I was looking for conversion software or something, but your best bet is to find an old machine similar to the one you had (try thrift store?) and print off hard copies. Personally, I suggest you give up on retrieving the data. IF, by chance, you find a way to do it...I'd love to know as well. I'll be adding this to my monitored message list. Good luck, if you continue trying -Kevin ASRock K7S41GX AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1850MHz 512MB DDR333 WD 160GB IDE HDD ATI Radeon 9200 128MB AGP8x

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Oh well. Thanks for all of the replies though. I may give up on it. I tried a program called "mirkes.de tiny hexer" that supposedly allowed you to edit hard disks, and floppy disks. When I inserted the disk and selected "A:" an error appeared that said "Divide by Zero". I guess all hope is lost. I may decide to keep trying, and if I discover something I'll post back. Thanks again!

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Try using Omnidisk (OmniFlop for the user friendly version). I used it to read 13(?) year old 2DD disks (well kept/preserved). Format was also non-standard 76/1/15x256. The program is VERY powerful and can even read beyond the 80th cylinder if you want. Won't work if you're using external drive though, but anything supporting the UPD765 (pretty much all internal floppy drives) will work. Best of luck.

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Thanks alot! I'll give it a try.

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