Q. What causes a floppy disk to suddenly become ‘unformatted’? On several occasions I have tried to retrieve documents or files from a 3.5 disk that I know was properly formatted when the file was saved on it only to get the message “this disk is not formatted, do you want to format it now?” I know that if I format the disk, I will lose all the information on it. Is there any way to retrieve the files or documents from such a disk?
A. Floppy disks were good in their day as a means of storing data. In fact, they were crucial in the “olden days” of computing. If you have used a computer for any length of time you probably have some laying around with who knows what stored on them.
These diskettes do go bad over time. Temperature, dust and time all play a role in the deterioration of this media. You don’t get much warning, if any. One day it’s fine the next it’s making a horrible grinding noise as your drive attempts to read the data.
With devices like thumb drives, CD/DVD burners and portable hard drives getting less and less expensive, it make little to no sense to be using floppy disks as a method of archiving data.
Also, when you consider that you can store the equivalent of 500 floppy disks on a single CD or 800 disks on a 1 gig flash drive it seems foolish to keep your valuable data on something as fragile as a diskette.
You should consider converting any floppies you have as soon as possible.
For those floppies that have already failed there is a tool I have used with considerable success. It’s called BadCopy Pro and it’s well worth trying out if you are in a jam. It is specifically designed to recover data from diskettes that show as unformatted or not accessible in Windows.