Floppy Recovery Report
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Floppy Diskette Recovery Report

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User Report experienced and written by Mike

Due to an interesting corrupt floppy, an internet search for a floppy recovery program was made. There are many recovery programs, but very few for file recovery of bad, or corrupt floppies which may have trashed fats, trashed root directory, bad sectors, etc.

My test floppy had 36 bad sectors near the beginning, with 1.37megs of data, consisting of 36 files of a binary nature.

The first challenge was to get an image copy of the floppy. It then could be restored to a new floppy. This was done, however there was no directory structure, although dos/windows reported no files taking up over a meg of space and leaving 233k free. Cute.

A number of recovery programs were downloaded, both freeware and demo shareware, and tried against the new floppy. Undelete only programs were not considered. Programs which do not support recovery of binary data were not considered.

All tests were done using a standard 3.5 floppy drive under Win 98 with 384 megs of RAM. Tests took place from May 15 to May 22, 2003 using software releases as described below.

Only two programs could actually scan and find files on the floppy. Other programs could scan but found nothing. Still others didn't even try or didn't find a thing.

All the information on this page applies to one set of circumstances, which are unique. There are no guarantees for you and your milage may vary. Use the information at your own risk.

BadCopy Pro   3.6.5  $39.95
Cost:  $39.95 single, $399 site - Use the product permanently, free updates for two years.
WORKED FOR ME? YES
GetDataBack for FAT  V2.17 Demo $69.00
Cost:  $69.00, Use the product permanently: Yes  Free updates: Yes
WORKED FOR ME? NO (only tried on a floppy)

Any program described below this line worked just a bit or didn't really work at all.

Active File Recovery   V3.0  Demo $29.95 - $49.00
RiteRecovery   V1.0  Demo  $149.00
R-Studio V2.0   Demo  $79.99
ZDU V2.4.12 (Free)
PC Inspector File Recovery  V3.x  (Free)
Update 2003/10/02 User Report
A user reported that after trying a number of programs found here, he recovered his important file with this program.
Flopshow   V1.2  (Free)
RECOVER Fixed/Floppy Disk Version 1.4 (Free)
Floppy Recovery from Dtidata  (Free)

Easy Recovery by Ontrack was not considered because the trial download was over 26Megs!

The other option is to actually engage the services of a recovery service. Here is one to try.
 

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