bad floppy disk

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my mom gave me a floppy disk (which contains excel files) to copy to a usb drive. the problem is, when we put the disk in drive a, it says the disk needs to be formatted. i asked her, and it is the same disk she has been using and has already been formatted. i googled the problem, and all i see is the same info over and over, and from what i am reading, all the free programs are junk and won't do what i need to do. does anyone have any idea how to access this disk? if i have to go to the command prompt, i will, just give me the steps.
 

dtravis7


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Does your mom have a PC? I wonder how the floppy is formatted?
 
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Try booting from an Ubuntu Live CD and see if that will read the disk. Do you know what OS the floppy was formatted on?
 

chscag

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To the OP:

Assuming the floppy disk is a standard 1.44 MB or 720 K floppy. (If it's an IBM HD 2.88 MB, all bets are off.)

Sometimes, a floppy disk formatted and written to on one machine is not recognized on another. This can occur because of head misalignment on the machine it was originally written to.

I suggest trying to extract the Excel files from the floppy when it is in the machine where it was originally written to. If that's not possible, you may be able to extract the data using a copy of Norton Utilities. Some versions of NU have a disk low level disk editor (diskedit.exe) which can read files on a floppy such as the one you have.

Regards.
 
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thanks... i'll try the NU and see what happens.
 

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