Floppy disc problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Goldendauber
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Goldendauber

I cannot open files on any of my floppy discs in the A drive. I get a message
statig the data media is not recognized.

Thank you
 
Never ever read from, write to, or print from floppy with Word. These are
the most certain methods of ensuring document corruption (which may have
already occurred).

Copy to the hard disc and work on the document from there.


--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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Copy them to your hard disk first, then try to open them.

Floppy drives are prehistoric technology and probably you have an old drive
in old hardware. It may be clogged with eons of dirt or the heads may be out
of alignment.

It may also be that you floppies have been damaged by stray electromagnetic
or magnetic fields or have been poorly stored (e.g. extremes of hot, cold or
damp conditions).

Try to see if you can find someone with a floppy drive that could test the
disks for you before writing them off.
 
Terry Farrell said:
Copy them to your hard disk first, then try to open them.

Floppy drives are prehistoric technology and probably you have an old
drive in old hardware. It may be clogged with eons of dirt or the heads
may be out of alignment.

It may also be that you floppies have been damaged by stray
electromagnetic or magnetic fields or have been poorly stored (e.g.
extremes of hot, cold or damp conditions).

Try to see if you can find someone with a floppy drive that could test the
disks for you before writing them off.
Click to expand...

For what it is worth, I purchased a Dell in 2007 and had them install a
floppy disc because I had quite of bit of data on floppies at the time. I
have not had any problems whatsoever with Microsoft Word or Excel. I can
save or retrieve with no problems. It is slow however in retrieving and
writing directly to this A drive. Using a floppy is great for quick ,
temporary back-up of spreadsheets that are not too large.
Good Luck.
Gene L
 
It is also extremely dangerous. Until the demise of the floppy drive (very
few users actually order a floppy these days), saving ,opening, printing or
editing a Word document directly from a floppy was the numero uno way to
corrupt a document. This has now been superseded by the USB pen drive.

I won't disagree that many users seem lucky and never have problems working
with either, but if you scroll through several years of these newsgroups
(using Google Groups search), you'll find many very unhappy users who have
lost important work (such as months of thesis work) because they worked
directly with a floppy.

It is all down to the way Word creates its file when saved: it writes to and
from the active folder building up the document structure and because of the
slow speed of floppy drives (and many USB drives), causes Word to corrupt.
Also pulling out a floppy or USB drive before closing the document and Word
can cause all sorts of other problems when Word tries to remove temporary
files.

Knowing this, you would be ill-advised to continue working directly with
floppies.

Terry
 
It is all down to the way Word creates its file when saved: it writes to
and from the active folder building up the document structure and because
of the slow speed of floppy drives (and many USB drives), causes Word to
corrupt. Also pulling out a floppy or USB drive before closing the
document and Word can cause all sorts of other problems when Word tries to
remove temporary files.
Click to expand...

Also the capacity of the floppy, because Word will create the temporary
working copy in the same folder. At 1.4 MB floppy capacity, it's only very
small or plain text documents that are safe...
 
Word has a built in safety device for that: if you insert a graphic, when
you press Save, the floppy drive explodes!

Terry
 
If the floppy-drive is still reasonally clean run scandisk on the floppy.
I got lucky once with this trick and earned a nice bottle of wine.

Flip
 
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