I have sets of 3½-inch floppy diskettes that have data that I wish to recover. Some of the files on the floppy media cannot be read and result in cyclic redundancy check errors.

I would request a recommendation of good software that supports recovery from floppy drives and floppy media.

I have many software tools to recover hard disks (with my typical being R-Studio) and USB flash media, but none of them appear to work with Floppy drives.

Some interesting hardware here (eg DiscFerret)...

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disks

Otherwise ddrescue?

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Thank you fzabkar for your suggestions.

I am doubtful that the added benefit in investing in hardware would be cost effective for this job; there may be some loss, but it may be within tolerance.

I had forgotten about ddrescue.

To add to this, with ddrescue you can try to make an image of the disk, with the ability to use different floppy drives. One drive may read some sectors better than others, and vice-versa.

And if you want to go back a bit in time, I seem to remember that some floppy copy programs could read the raw sectors, mostly for the use of cloning copy protected disks. One I found digging through my old archives is CopyStar v4.31. It was not a free program, and not sure how many programs like that can still be bought. But I would bet if you looked hard enough for the old ones that no longer exist, you may find a "working" copy of them. Depending on the type of files you are trying to recover, reading the sectors raw my yield some useful data, even if the sector is corrupt.

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Badcopy pro?

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I have that one in my archives too, but didn't mention it because I don't remember using it.

I do remember that you can't read the raw disk data with a USB floppy drive, it has to be a real one connected directly to the motherboard. (I couldn't read or write a copy protected disk with my USB floppy drive)

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My main computer's motherboard has a floppy controller, but does not have floppy support from the motherboard's chipset. The BIOS does seem to handle the drive well. Generally, most software I have used is able to recognize and use the floppy drive without issue, though few have not (I forgot which ones).

@maximus - Trying to read the problem sectors (some appear to be magnetic errors, others may be failed) with different floppy drives is a good idea.

CopyStar v4.31 is indeed not difficult to find. I have not tried it yet. Unfortunately, it becomes oftentimes much more difficult to find software once a company disappears.

I have tried BadCopy Pro and it does read the floppy; however it was not good enough to recover data.

The best software to recover / copy floppies I know is VGAcopy/386, you can download it here (freeware):

https://moenk.de/index.php?serendipity[subpage]=downloadmanager&thiscat=2&file=1

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File Scavenger can work with floppy disks too.

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Don't forget to use a floppy drive cleaning disk as often as needed. The material from the old floppies can come off and make the head dirty, which makes it harder to read disks.

Not to date myself, but I remember the 5.25 disks from the AppleIIe days, and having some game disks go bad. There was this wonderful program called Locksmith for copying the disks with copy protections, but bad sectors were something else. Back then those drives had a couple potentiometers in them for calibration purposes. I had no idea how they worked, but I made sure the original positions were marked, then tweaked them until I got a good read. Too bad things aren't that easy anymore...

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What technique to perform the cleaning would you recommend. Does one apply the Isopropyl alcohol and wait some time for it to kill the mould. Perhaps, apply and wipe immediately with an anti-static microfiber cloth?

You had mentioned that after cleaning a disk of mould and gaining more reads, the disk should be tossed in the garbage bin. Is this just a precaution to guard against future failure to the disk due to more growth of mould or is there another reason.

I do not believe it would be worth it for what has not been recovered. But thank you for offering.

Thank you, their information is quite useful and interesting.

FYI, there is a complete assembly listing of the original PC/AT BIOS in the following tech manual, with 12 pages devoted to diskette operations. There are also circuit diagrams of the motherboard and floppy drives.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/at/
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/at/1502494_PC_AT_Technical_Reference_Mar84.pdf

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I have managed to recover most the data. There were one or two files that were not recovered, but it is believed that only one of those contained potentially useful data. Given what the lost file was thought to be; it was determined that further recovery was not worth the time/delay in attempting to complete the task using other techniques or tools. Unfortunately, I had not waited long enough for some of information from this thread to become available before processing one of the floppies .I had used some destructive process to try to recover the usability of the floppy and to try to determine (out of curiosity) how many of the bad sectors were due to non-permanent magnetic errors. I would have liked to try some other options out of interest.

Thanks to all that assisted in this thread. Given the assistance, I learned some useful new things and found/collected new resources. A special mention for Spildit whom also pointed me to The HDD Oracle.