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Ask Slashdot: Recovering Data From 20-Year-Old Diskettes?

Posted by timothy on from the all-your-priceless-ascii-art dept.

First time accepted submitter Zilog writes "The end of the 3.5-inch floppy and the disappearance of associated drives showed to me the need to backup the tens of diskettes that accompanied my youth. Carefully preserved, these diskettes have proved readable for the most part — while some are approaching 20 years old. However, some diskettes have shown surface defects in areas with compressed archives (zip). Any ideas on how to recover (as much as possible) these bad sectors?"

5 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. Norton Disk Doctor by metiscus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Find an old copy of norton disk doctor and use it to do bad sector recovery on those disks. I remember it working pretty well back in the day.

    1. Re:Norton Disk Doctor by pegr · · Score: 5, Informative

      Somewhat better than Norton is Spinrite. Remember Steve Gibson's hard disk utility? The one that could recover "unrecoverable" errors? Works on floppies too.

  2. Re:The wisdom of using compression in archives by msauve · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now, be useful and go back 20 years to give him that advice.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  3. Hands down by eclectro · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you can find one use a Superdisk to read a floppy. The heads are much more sensitive and narrow and can read ordinary floppies better than a regular floppy drive. I have used this to recover data from floppy disks that were old/worn.

    --
    Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
  4. ddrescue. by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Informative

    GNU ddrescue.

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    Please help metamoderate.