3 questions about search and restore from floppy drives

[alexfus]

Dear Sirs! I have three questions: Can this or other software restore data from floppy drives (diskettes) with bad sectors? Can it find deleted files on such floppies? Does it write something on the floppy during restore or search? Please answer them.

Regards,

Alex

[nukecad]

Yes Recuva can recover deleted files from floppys, as long as you have a floppy drive to read them with and they are formatted to a file system that Windows can read.
If they were formatted with Windows then they are probably FAT12, FAT16, or possibly FAT32 format, all of which Recuva can read.

Be aware that floppy discs are prone to degrade over time, so if these are old discs they may be unreadable anyway, have you tried reading them already to see what is still on there?

They could/can also be quite easily damaged, which is one reason why they went out of widespread use. (Although you can still buy them and new drives to use them).

Obviously anything written (or partially written) to a bad sector will be lost.
Likewise if the floppy disc is physically damaged then you will be out of luck.

Recuva does not write anything to the drive that you are attempting recovery from.
(Unless you specifically tell it to recover what it has found to the same drive, and that isn't a good Idea as you may/will overwrite what you are trying to recover).
Presumably these are 3.5" floppys? So if you want to be sure then just slide the write protect tab so that the hole is open, as long as you can see through the hole nothing can be written to the disc.
Presumably you would want to write any files recovered to more modern media anyway, such as a USB stick.

TBH I have never (yet) had to try and recover from a floppy, although I have successfully recovered files from other FAT# formatted media.

Hopefully all goes well and you can get some or all of the deleted files back.

 

[Andavari]

I've successfully used Recuva on a floppy diskette maybe 10+ years ago, it got every file back that was accidentally deleted, but there weren't any bad sectors to deal with.

With bad sectors your mileage may vary, if there aren't any files stored where there are bad sectors you may be able to get the files back, but floppies far too easily start getting bad sectors while just sitting around and not being used - the Earths magnetic field can't be all that good for them either over several years.

[alexfus]

Thanks to everybody for answering my questions. Especially for nukecad becasuse of detailed information.