Floppy disk recovery

Just been out with Jeremy of (Ex) Watford Wizard fame for a popadom or
two

He has a problem - he can't read the 3 1/2 floppy with all his passwords
on ( backups ? - I presume not)

Does anyone know of s/w preferably free that might get the itinerent
magician out of his predicament

 

That'll be Norton Utilities from back in the mists of time. The bits
that were usable were never free then though so I don't expect they
would be now. GWBasic what is old enough to run in DOS also contains
lots of disk access tools that could be useful. That should be free.

 

So a shite old machine required too then to put DOS on

 

Abracadabra or Shazzam.

 

Not necessarily, the tools are also native to any form of *nix.

 

He's prolly tried those, in addition to various other words of
"encouragement"

 

Before doing ANYTHING - make a copy with
DOS diskcopy (IIRC) and work on that.

NEVER make changes to the original.

Sometimes (v. sometimes) the 'copy' will work better
than the original and may allow the data to be read
without further fiddling. Always worth a try. There arre good
reasons for this but I have forgotten them.

 

Replies forwarded to him ...

 

define 'read'?

Does the host see the disk or does it just click and grind?

IIWY I'd try a new drive if you've not already.

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I used to have something at work years ago with a very early version of
PC Tools IIRC that would "refresh a floppy" (DISK!).

He could try one of these:

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/bad_floppy_disk_software/
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Hmm, if you need to go that far, download vmware server from here:

http://www.vmware.com/download/server/

(You'll need a free registration/licence key)

Install Windows 95 and then Norton (or some other old DOS type tools)

 

PhotoRec is a tool I've used under *Nix to recover data from a USB
key and hard drive so should be okay for a 3 1/2 incher.
I've just looked and it comes in Bill Gates flavour too...
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

PS like your style, Floppy disks hey - have you still got Betamax???

 

Read my original post

it's not me, it's an ex member of UKRM who escaped and got a life

 

Dunno - I'd better to get him to resub ...

 

Will that work on floppies ?

 

mine too

 

Yes I did read the original post, obviously it didn't sink in.....
I'm sure it'd be safer to store the passwords on a piece of paper - if
you're protecting your data from anyone on the net you wouldn't want to
store them anywhere on your PC removable disk or not??

 

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