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Any way to recover (400k) floppy disk?

danda

Well-known member
Hi,

I just received a boxed ThunderScan (the little device that turns an ImageWriter printer into a scanner) off ebay, but am having software issues.

The 400k disk would only read in my Classic II, all other computers would say "This disk is unreadable. Do you want to initialise it?". Of course, me being stupid, I did not take this as a sign and immediately back it up on the working Classic II.

Now, it will not read on any of my computers, even the Classic II. It just asks if I want to initialise it.

Is there any way of recovering this disk? I know that the information is still relatively OK, as it did read fine on the Classic II yesterday.

Thanks,

danda

 

danda

Well-known member
Managed to get it working - for some reason it decided to read on my PowerBook 520. I have no idea why, but have now made backups and copies of it.

 

onlyonemac

Well-known member
For future referance, the simplest trick is to just keep ejecting and re-inserting the disk. Sometimes only a very small change in the alignment of the disk in the drive is enough to make it readable or unreadable. You could also make a point of putting the disk in at slightly different angles, but usually just ejecting and re-inserting it is sufficient to make it readable. Also, like you were doing, it is a good idea to try the disk in more than one computer because sometimes the slight differences of the alignment of the heads in different drives will also make it readable in one drive but not in another.

 
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