recovering files from old Chinese floppies

[Xiao Kui]

during my early yrs in China from 1999-2004 I was still using floppy disks. Now i'm living in the US and would like to recover Word files from those disks, but Word is telling me it doesn't recognize the media, even though the word files are showing up in Windows and in the menu. I created these on an American PC and i'm pretty sure my dad's old pc had no trouble reading these back in the day so I don't know if it's due to new windows or what. I can't get Word to open anything!

Anyone have experience accessing the data from these old floppies on new computers? if not, is this something that you think the average Chinese computer tech could easily do? (i plan to be in China 2 weeks from now, so I may just bring them with me.) feeling a bit frustrated since I bought a floppy disk drive just for this purpose and i can't open anything on 20+ disks though the menu is telling me my data is still there . . . :/ Thanks for any suggestions!

[gato]

What error message are you getting?

If it's not a compatibility problem, then the files could be corrupted from the traveling.

[imron]

Using windows explorer, are you able to copy the files from the floppy drive to your hard drive? This will let you know if any portion of the file has been corrupted.

[Xiao Kui]

i'm not able to copy it. i'm getting a "media not recognized. it may not be formatted" message when I try to do this. i looked up this error on Microsoft it says

"This problem occurs on disks that do not contain a media descriptor byte in the BIOS parameter block (BPB) of the boot sector. Some older preformatted floppy disks do not contain a media descriptor byte. Older product disks may also not have the media descriptor byte.

The media descriptor indicates the type of medium currently in a drive. With MS-DOS and Windows 95, you do not have to set the media descriptor byte. Therefore this problem does not occur with these older operating systems. The media descriptor byte is located in the BPB of the boot sector at offset 21 (15h) and in the first byte of each FAT on the disk."

I read somewhere that this media descriptor byte can be modified using DiskProbe but that's way out of my realm of competency Does that sound like it may be the problem to you, Imron? gato, i don't really understand how the files could be corrupted by traveling, and how could i be getting this message for every single file on 20 disks, some of which were packed together, some weren't?!?!

thanks for both of your suggestions.

[gato]

Check whether is a problem with the disk drive. Is it able to read other floppies?

If the disk drive is fine, then your disks are corrupted. You can try doing file recovery using a program like BadCopy Pro. Google "floppy disk recovery" for other choices.

Floppy disks can be damaged by being bent, pressed, knocked around, so they can be easily damaged under travel conditions. Heat and dust also can damage them.

[drencrom]

It is likely your floppies are Double Density (DD). Newer computers can’t read it; they can only read High Density (HD) floppies. The easiest thing to do would be to pull out your credit card and send the disks to a data recovery specialist. Or, try booting linux and writing a floppy image...but that depends on a level of technical skill that not everyone possesses.

[gato]

If your dad still has his old computer or if you can find a computer that's running a version of Windows before XP, you could try reading the disks on that computer.

HD floppy is just 1.44MB floppy. That was already the standard by 1999, so hard to say whether your problem is because you're using 720K double density disks.

[Xiao Kui]

the disk drive is brand new, and seems to be functioning properly so i doubt it's a problem with that. although, admittedly I don't have any other floppies to test it with - all i have is these old chinese ones, and they are double sided high density kinds. I've already tried BadCopy Pro unsuccessfully. Now I plan to try my dad's old computer because yes, it still works, but it's running XP. my 2nd course of action is trying a tech when i go to China in 2 weeks, because everyone was using these floppies less than 10 years ago, and i bet techs over there have experience recovering the data for companies. my 3rd course of action is a company called Retro Floppy that i found online and personally esponded to my inquiry with a reasonable quote right away. Thanks everyone for your help with this - i'll let you know how it goes

[Xiao Kui]

UPDATE:

Yay, Dad's computer could read 90% of the files, and the ones it couldn't read are older versions of files i have the updated versions of Dad kept the computer so my mom and nephew could play Tet-su together, a game i've never played which apparently (their version at least) doesn't run on the new Windows. haha, good ol' Tetsu! Thanks again, all!