Unreadable but important floppy

postitlord

postitlord

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A friend has a file that's very important to him. It's on a floppy. We cannot read his floppy. Both Mac and Win say it can't be read. I believe it's a Mac disk. He is very sure there's a file on it. I chastised him and did explain that floppies are an unreliable medium for backing up. It is his only copy.

Well, we tried Mac 10.1.4 First Aid. It could FIND errors, but not fix them. It's weird. It says it repaired the errors, but when I run Verify again, the exact same errors are there.

Sorry I do not exactly remeber the error names, B-TREE comes to mind.

The question is, is the file salvagable, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY? Do we have to call a specialist and pay 30$/h !? Is there maybe better software for repairing diskettes (Then what's included with the OS)? ...?
 
Is it an 800k floppy? Most floppy drives made recently cannot read 800k floppies.
 
Hmmmm, I haven't used a floppy in OS 10 yet, but I'm willing to bet that if it is that old, either the file can't be all that important, or that the floppy has been corrupted. Try under OS 9?
 
Oops, my bad, I forgot to mention we also tested this on his "work computer", it's an iMac he got recently.. a few months ago-ish.. I assume it had OS 9.x on it...

Mac OS 9.x wants to initialize.
Mac OS 10.x wants to repair or initialize.

To quote my friend. He's an old guy. "It contains my life's work."
So here I am, cursing.

Is a B-TREE error easily fixed, or is it graveously dead forever kind of error?
 
Life's work on 2000 bytes? You've got to be kidding. Anyway, one other thing you could try is to see if there was someone you know who has an old mac with System 7.x, or something on it.
 
Originally posted by postitlord
To quote my friend. He's an old guy. "It contains my life's work."
Click to expand...
If that's true then STOP!!! Bring this to someone who knows.

Modifying this on multiple computers can trash ir forever...

If the magnetic heads on a floppy get out of allignment then it is possible that the floppy can ONLY be read by that drive.
 
Really?! I was afraid of something like that. I was hesitant to even try First Aid's repair at all. So I may have messed up the file. Well at least it doesn't report any new errors.
Hm, my requesting other software to fix this ain't the solution, it could make it worse.....

What would a professional do? Run some non-invasive (that is, reads only) fancy software.. Where would I find such a person? Are there stores of people offering this service at some local Mac store?
 
I, personally, haven't had a need to try these guys, but I remember reading their ads in MacWorld all the time..... I think they're worth a shot, as they've rescued data from hard disk that were even submerged in water.... DriveSavers is probably kinda expensive, but, if it really is his "life's work," then it'll be well worth it:

http://www.drivesavers.com/
 
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