floppy fixer/viewer ???

[pdstein]

I have an important floppy disk that has a number of files on it that are no longer readable.[nbsp][nbsp]I'm trying to find some software (Win98 or NT) that might be able to fix the errors or at the very least view sectors of data.[nbsp][nbsp]Something that is shareware or has a 30 day trial would be nice.

[Chris Judd]

Your best bet is to run Scandisk on the floppy.[nbsp][nbsp]Choose "thorough" type of test and check "automatically fix errors".[nbsp][nbsp]If this brings you no luck you probably have a bad disk.

[sheila]

We recently had a hard drive crash, and used Lost and Found by PowerQuest to recover most of our files.
www.powerquest.com (http://www.powerquest.com)

I'm not sure if it works for floppies, but you could check out their web site.

That software is amazing.

[sheila]

My husband recently referred to using Scandisk to fix disk errors as being like performing surgery with a butter knife.

But seriously, you don't have to have scandisk set to delete files it can't fix. We have ours configured so that it prompts us before deleting files.
Still, I would not even run it over the floppy once. You never know. It could muck something up.

When I first posted, I didn't notice the request for freeware/trialware. In our recent search for such a utility, we didn't find anything we were willing to trust our hard drive to that didn't require $$ up front. Of course, we had a LOT of stuff on our hard drive. If you only have a few files on your floppy, maybe it's not worth $70 to you.

[Justin]

I would recommend using a real recovery tool such as the one mentioned above, and NOT trying scandisk first. Scandisk's method of "fixing" errors is to simply delete files it can't read... it doesn't fix anything except marking the files as gone...

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest (http://www.FutureQuest.net/index.php) Support