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PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT
Can I recover my old floppies?
Q I have a Windows 10 PC and also two machines running Windows XP. Neither of the two old computers are connected to the internet. With these older PCs I produced many floppy disks as storage, but they’re now not in regular use. I would like to commit the contents of these disks to an archive, so I purchased a USB floppy drive to do the job. However, all three machines report that the disks have errors, suggesting that they need to be reformatted. My question therefore is will reformatting a floppy remove the contents? If the answer is yes, how might I otherwise retrieve the information?
J M Stewart Clark
A Yes, formatting a disk would have the effect of wiping its contents, at least at the surface level, so that is very much the last thing you want to do!
We don’t know how many disks you have, but if they’re all producing errors when you try to access them then it suggests they’ve all suffered the same fate. It could be warping through cycles of heat and cool while in storage, prolonged exposure to magnetism or just good old-fashioned physical deterioration – because floppy disks simply don’t last forever.
As such, we have to be honest and say that we don’t hold out much hope that you’ll get anything off this ancient storage media. However, there are a couple of things you can try.
In the first instance, try Recuva, which is a free download from . Click ‘All files’ followed by Next, and then ‘In a specific location’ (see screenshot ), followed by Browse. Now choose your USB floppy drive and click Next. Tick ‘Enable Deep Scan’followed by Start. If Recuva finds any files, it’ll display them as a list. Entries marked with a green dot are recoverable, so click to tick the ones you want and then click Recover. Now choose a destination for the recovered files and click OK.
