Recovering files from bad floppy

[shmokes]

Does anyone have any ideas for recovering files from bad floppy disks?  A girl called me in a panic last night because her whole senior thesis, and all the spreadsheets containing the data for it were stored on a single floppy disk of all places.

The disk appears to have a corrupted file allocation table.  Trying to access it from Windows Explorer gives the message that the disk is not formatted and would I like to format it. 

I've tried Jufsoft Badcopy Pro, which was able to recover quite a few files from the root directory of the disk, but the only files that are important are in a folder one level off the root called Thesis.  Badcopy doesn't even seem to see this.

I also tried a program called PC Inspector File Recovery.  After scanning the disk I can actually see the folder and the files inside it (a coupld of Word files and an Excel spreadsheet).  But I can't do anything with the files.  When I try to recover them, or do anything with them really, it repeatedly gives the error:

NT_read error
error no.23
drv:0 LBA:2228 blocks:1
Abort, Retry or Ignore?

For the most part the error just keeps popping up over and over again regardless of which option I choose.  If I say Ignore enough times it will actually finish the job eventually, but the resulting file is useless.

Any ideas?  This girl is desperate, but too poor to send it to a data recovery firm (not to mention that she's supposed to give a presentation on this material on Wednesday).

[quarterback]

If she's ever used that floppy on a computer, it's very possible there are temp files or 'deleted' temp files of her work.

I'd try recovering some of those deleted files off of the PC's hard drive.  There are a number of programs out there but I've used something called "DirSnoop" before (it's old, circa mid late 90s) and rec4all (or something like that)

These are just basic programs that show the 'deleted' files that are on your hard drive.  I'm not sure what file type her "thesis" file is, but if it's anything opened by a Microsoft app, you have to figure there are temp files all over the freakin place.

[paigeoliver]

Also, teach her to never ever use floppies again. The ones they make today are garbage. My work does its weekly database backup on floppies (all the stupid system we use supports), and truthfully I could just do the backup and then throw the floppy in the trash, as a good 30 percent of them are bad by the first time we try to read them. Probably half the ones in the box for 2000/2001 have "BAD" written on them.

I had to use a bunch of floppies a few times when setting up old laptops (non-cdrom ones), and when installing drivers from IBM's website, which for some reason provides many of the drivers in this idiot format, you download a zip file, which contains an app that writes images to floppies, and of course the first floppy puts them back together on the hard drive. IDIOCY.

Anyway, I have never manage to get a file spanned past 5 discs without getting at least one bad disc, and these are with brand new discs right out of the shrink wrap.

[shmokes]

Yeah, she's already got the floppy lecture.  The temp file thing is a good idea, and I think there's a program called Recover My Files or something that might snoop them out.  The problem is, I'm pretty sure she did this in a computer lab at school.  But she works in the Center for Politics and I think was working on a computer in there so hopefully those computers are treated more like stand alone computers than the ones in the regular computer labs (if it was a computer in a regular computer lab I doubt there are any temp files on there).

Can Excel open the temp files directly....I mean do they have an xls extension?  If not, can they just be renamed or opened from the open dialog within Excel or do they need ot be converted or imported somehow?

[fastredpacman]

Which os are you using? Because Ive run into that problem with xp and I put that same exact floppy in a windows 98 comp and I can recover the files about 97% of the time. 

[shmokes]

Really?  I'll definitely try that.  I am trying to recover the files on an XP machine.  I'll take it in to work tomorrow, where I have a 98 machine, and try it from there.  Thanks.

[Trenchbroom]

Hmm.  I was curious if the quality of floppy disks had plummeted over the past 10 years, or if they were always this bad and we had just forgotten how poor they truly were.

I swear though that 5 1/4" floppies lasted much longer (with proper care, no paperclipping them or bending them) than the 3 1/2"s do.  But again, it may just be my selective memory.

[paigeoliver]

The quality of them plummeted once they stopped being important to the average user. I only ever had one bad floppy from my early days of computing (and that one had been missing the little metal shield for a LONG TIME). I probably have a dozen floppies at home now, I'll wager half of them are bad.

[fastredpacman]

So did you try the 98 machine??