I have a floppy disk that I have some important information on but I can't access the disk through windows; there is some kind of formatting problem. What happened was I connected the IDE cable on my friend's computer upside down when installing the floppy drive, and the disk must have become damaged somehow when I tried to open one of the files. now when I try to open the "A" drive in windows, it says the disk is not correctly formatted. there is no physical damage to the disk. Is there any kind of software that can bypass this formatting problem and allow me to get at least some of my data back? I've searched for some data recovery software but so far I still haven't found anything that will work. Please help, I'm sure there must some way to get to the data.

You best bet would be to use Nortons DISKEDIT program that is part of Norton's disk tools. It allows you to read the drive at low level and look at the the data by sector. You might be able to view the data and collect sectors into usable files with part of your data. How well you would be able to do this depends on the format of the data. Plan ASCII text is easy. There are also older DOS based tools that allow you to look at diskettes, by sector, and view the data that way.

thanks for responding so quickly. I just tried to use diskedit, and when it scanned the disk in the A drive, no files came up or anything; it just stayed at that screen where you choose what drive to scan. I guess this means that diskedit isn't going to help much, unless I'm doing something wrong. Is it possible that the whole floppy disk was completely erased when I tried to open the file? Any other ideas or programs that I should try?

One other thing you might try is putting the disk in another floppy drive, preferbly the same one that created the disk in the first place. Often a floppy created in one drive cannot be read in another. This comes about if the head alignment on the two drives are at extreme ends of their tolerances and cannot pick up the track markers correctly. Stuart

I've tried to read the disk in the floppy drive that created it, but it gives me the same problem as when I try to open it on my home computer. Here's one other thing I was thinking of trying. I've been reading a lot about data recovery and undeleting files. So, what if I do a quick format to the floppy disk(not a full format) so that these programs will be able to read the disk; Then, use a file recovery Undeletion program to recover the files. Does this sound Possible? The only hesitation to trying this is, if it doesn't work then I know the data is lost forever. Please, let me know what you think. Is this worth a try or is it a sure way to permanantly delete the data. Thanks, Anthony

It worth a try although I dont hold out much hope of success. If Diskedit failed to read the disk it is unlikely that a quick format will change anything. One more thing you might try is Diskcopy. It might read the disk as it does multiple tries of bad sectors. You will probably end up with another blank disk. At the end of the day, Quickformat is worth a try, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Stuart

Hey stuart, how do you use diskcopy? I found it under ms dos applications in the windows/system32 file, but when I try to run it, the black command screen pops up then it dissappears. Also, I did a test with another disk (that works fine) to try the quick format idea. I made sure it was blank, then copied a file onto it, did a quick format, then opened it up with Winhex and actually recovered all of the data. However, when I tried to do a quick format on the disk with the important info on it, it told me "this disk cannot be quick formatted". If I don't click "quick format" when I'm formatting, does that completely erase all data permanantly?