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Chapter – 10
Data Recovery From Corrupted Floppy
The Floppy is one of the most unreliable sources for data storage. If you go to any organization which uses computer systems and ask to its employees about the problems generated by floppy disks, you will very commonly hear the problem that the employee of the organization was having some important data in his floppy and now the floppy is not readable by the computer and a messages is displayed something like,
“Can not read the disk”
“Track 0 Bad”
“Invalid Drive or Capacity”
“The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?”
This is the everyday problem for the organizations which uses computer systems and floppy. The problem becomes critical when you come to know that there was no backup made or backup available for the data which seems to be lost in the corrupted floppy disk.
The biggest hell of the problem is supposed to come when you make backup in the floppy for your critical information, rescue disks of Antivirus program to overcome the virus attack or boot records or other backups (there may be number of possibilities) in a floppy and when you want to reuse the backup from the floppy it gives a reading error.
In such condition you are about to lose your important information and data or even in some cases when you feel the lack of backups and recovery program for you computer boot information and Virus attack rescue programs etc., you may suffer a big loss of data in form of OS crash occurred due to the lack of information, stored in the floppy that is not readable by the computer now.
In such cases it becomes most important requirement to recover the data from the floppy that has been declared bad by your computer system.
Why the floppy is not readable
The most common problem that causes a floppy to show such type of error messages is the corruption of its DOS boot record (DBR) of floppy, which helps the computer to know the logical identification of the floppy.
The DBR is a small program stored in track 0, head 0 and sector 1 and containing important information about the floppy such as:
- Number of bytes per sector
- Sector per cluster
- Number of FATs
- Maximum number of root directories etc.
| Since Floppy has no logical partition system therefore there is no MBR available in floppy. The First Sector of Floppy holds the DBR. This is also a main difference to compare logical structure of hard disk with a floppy. |
When we read the boot sector information of a floppy with the help of any disk editing program, it will display information like as in the figure given next.
The following figure shows the 512 Bytes information of the DBR of a 1.44MB, 3½ Inch floppy.
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