Thursday, April 9, 2009

A Guide To Do It Yourself Floppy Recovery

By Allie Sanchez

Although floppy disk technology has often been replaced by other portable storage media options nowadays such as CDs and portable storage drives, floppy disks are still used by many computer users. Some people continue to use floppy disks because they simply find them a convenient and easy storage medium. And, a lot of us have historic data stored on floppies that we haven't got round to transferring yet.

Like any storage medium a floppy disk can develop problems. Sometimes, for example, a disk can become physically damaged or can stop working because we haven't stored it correctly. And, there are many different reasons why the data on a floppy can get lost or corrupted so that we cannot retrieve it.

If the data contained on a floppy disk is important to you then you may want to try and recover it. In some cases you may want or need to use a specialist data recovery service. This is often the case if your floppy has suffered some kind of physical damage and you cannot sort out the problem yourself.

But, in some cases, you can actually use certain kinds of software programs to retrieve the data from a floppy disk so that you can access it again. These programs are relatively inexpensive or you can sometimes find free programs or shareware that might do the job for you.

Most software packages that can help you recover lost floppy data are designed to work on specific types of data access problems. So, for example, if you insert your floppy disk into your drive and your computer tells you that it cannot access the drive that the disk is in then a program here may work for you.

Alternatively, this kind of software solution can often help if your computer tells you that the actual disk is not coming up as being formatted. And, you can often recover data in this way if you have accidentally reformatted the disk itself so that you cannot access some data.

Before you buy/try this kind of software solution it is wise to assess exactly what kind of data problem you have. You can then match your problem with a software program that gives a suitable solution. Not all packages here will offer the same solutions so it is important to find one designed to meet your needs.

Although these programs often work on different problems many of them work in much the same way. So, for example, you simply load the software on to your computer, insert the floppy disk into the relevant drive and then run the software itself.

In most cases the software will run diagnostic scans on your actual floppy disk to find and assess the data that it contains. Some programs here are designed to extract data directly to your hard drive whilst others let you choose what you do with the data that is found and/or recovered. Other programs will also analyze your floppy to tell you if it contains any 'bad' areas and what they are so that you can assess whether a fix is possible.

This kind of software solution could well be a cost effective and quick way of accessing old data that is lost from your floppy disks. It can save you having to send disks off to data recovery experts in many instances and will therefore also make your data recovery take less time and effort. - 22787

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