i saved stuff on floppy disks now i can't get at it

i saved a bunch of writing on floppy disks when i was using windows me, now i'm not using it and nobody seems to have ME and all the xp's say i have to reformat the disks... is there a program i could download short of windows me to get to the saved info?

 

Just a suggestion as I've never had to.......
<my computer> <Floppy A> Right click <copy>
XP may take a snapshot and allow you to paste in a new word doc.

 

There isn't a program *to my knowledge* but I'll tell you what you can do.

85% chance that this is what happened:

Windows ME uses a file format system called FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32-bit) to store its files. This is what most floppy disk drives use. Windows XP on the other hand, is based off of Windows NT/2000, and uses NTFS (NT File System) to store files instead.

It's quite possible (as I've had it happen before) that Windows is just being a prick.

Here's what you should do: Take that floppy disk to another computer, one that isn't running a super new version of Windows (that might be hard to find), and copy the files there.

If that doesn't work, it's also possible that you pulled the floppy disk out too early (before it was done writing) and now the data is corrupted; there probably isn't a way to recover it if that's the case.

Do you get any errors for "cyclic redundancy check"? If you do, that means the data has been corrupted. If not, it's probably the first case.

 

That used to happen to my old computers so much. It turned out to be dust that settled in the drive.

 

Download a linux livecd, copy the files there.

 

I'm pretty sure Linux can't read FAT format either, unless you buy some program to do it.

 

I've never had any problems doing it.. I'm pretty sure it can read just about anything. I moved a bunch of stuff between winme and linux on floppies..

 

can you even buy programs for linux?

 

Yeah soemthings. I know you can buy Maya unlimited for linux if you've got a spare $7000 or so. But err anyway, to my knowledge not only can it read FAT, it can write it too, if you care to.

 

Hi Chaos. Can you tell me exactly what the message says word for word. Also can you open the floppy and see the files that are on it but can't access them, or can you not see anything on the floppy? If you can see the files but not open them could you tell me what the file extention is after the name? .txt? .wps? what? Normal text files should be able to be read by XP. You are going to have a problem if the file was written by a program running on your ME system that isn't installed on your XP system. You may be able to copy them and force the format depending on what's going on.

 

FAT32 is the most portable file system out there and XP can read and write to FAT32, yes it is that backwards compatible at least, as can Linux. I use XP to format FAT32 disks when I expect other OS's will be writting to the disk, FAT32 is still very useful in that regard. Linux can format to FAT32 btw.

Just yesterday I dug up an old floppy from 1997 (so that would make from a Win95 PC) and it copied and opened ok. Word files on that '97 disk also opened just fine in Office XP as there weren't complicated formatting.

I suspect the disks are corrupted, it doesn't take much to corrupt them, I've had numerous floppies go corrupted, thank goodness for external HDD.

 

turns out i'll be able to access the computer i used to save the stuff originally, so hopefully it will work..

 

it's not the o/s that's causing or contributing to the problem....it's the floppy....i doubt any system is gonna be able to read it... it's more than likely a corrupt disk.....a common problem with floppy's

 

Ok, this doesn't help chaos by for reading his floppies.
For Linux you need the appropriate modules in the kernel for reading other file formats.
You can load the modules into the running kernel without the need of restarting. The old fashioned commands in Linux are lsmod for listing the current running modules and modprobe for loading new modules. In Debian there is a tool called modconf. For the newer Kernels there' re modules for vfat, ntfs and a lot of others.