Copy to recover unreadable diskette

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Did it ever happen to you that you take home from office some files on a diskette which eventually (e.g. when you are sitting in the train heading home and want to load it on your portable), appears to be unreadable (e.g. your driver keeps on reading and in the end, you’re asked if you want to format it)? Well, to me it did.
AND now I found out that you might be able to recover it if you have some other diskette available: by using the copy-to-another-diskette-process provided in Windows (NT & 2000 at least: Explorer, select A-drive, right click and choose … from popup list).
In my case some error messages were generated telling me all kind of depressing news but I continued and… all (!?) files were copied to the other diskette!
Never too late to make such a discovery 🙂

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In this situation I am the one person in the company still to have a copy of REAL MS-DOS 6.22 and Norton Utilities 4.5, and have recovered some files from unhappy diskettes by using maintenance mode… Usually Windows just gags.

That’s why I like USB Flash “drives”!

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In this situation I am the one person in the company still to have a copy of REAL MS-DOS 6.22 and Norton Utilities 4.5, and have recovered some files from unhappy diskettes by using maintenance mode… Usually Windows just gags.

That’s why I like USB Flash “drives”!

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I’ve found that good old DISKCOPY can be used from the command line this way too. You might get complaints about sectors being unreadable, but DISKCOPY will nevertheless read and write good data from such sectors if it can.

Cheers

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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I wouldn’t be surprised if DISKCOPY is behind that right-click-menu-item feature. Those complaints you mention sound very familiar.
Thanks for the tips!

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I wouldn’t be surprised if DISKCOPY is behind that right-click-menu-item feature. Those complaints you mention sound very familiar.
Thanks for the tips!

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I’ve found that good old DISKCOPY can be used from the command line this way too. You might get complaints about sectors being unreadable, but DISKCOPY will nevertheless read and write good data from such sectors if it can.

Cheers

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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