Floppy Disc Recovery

Floppy discs are still in use nowadays. They are often used as archives (e.g. for crypto keys) and storages in vaults. Machine controls (e.g. in the printing industry or CNC controls) are also stillusing floppies. Attingo developed special methods for restoring data from floppy discs.

The storage capacity of a floppy disc depends on it either being single or double sided. The used magnetic material and the resulting single or double density (recording density) are also important factors.

Common floppy formats:

8 inch: 180 KB up to 1 MB
5 ¼ inch: 80 KB up to 1,2 MB
3 ½ inch: 720 KB up to 3,4 MB, especially the popular 1,44 MB version

Common systems

CT Raw
Generic FM
Generic MFM (IMA, IMG)
Atari 8-bit (XFD, FM, MFM)
AmigaDOS (ADF)
Amiga DiskSpare
Apple DOS 3.2
Apple DOS 3.3+
Apple DOS 400K/800K (CLV)
Emu
Emu II
DEC RX01
DEC RX02
CBM DOS (D64 error map)
CBM GCR image (G64)
CBM MicroProse
CBM RapidLok
CBM Datasoft
CBM Vorpal
CBM V-MAX!
CBM Teque
CBM TDP
CBM Big Five
CBM OziSoft

Common errors:

The main cause for defective floppies is hardware damage, wear marks to be precise. In contrast to hard drives the read/write heads touch the surface and those touch the case cover, so with the countless rotations wear marks are inevitable. Even the smallest contamintion (e.g. dust grains) on the inside of the floppy can cause massive damage.

Remove the floppy immediately if one of the following problems occurs:

No access possible

Strange noises

Reading errors occur

Slowed down reading or saving processes

Contact us immediatley for an individual assessment of the damage. Unfortunely many clients try to reconstruct the data on their own for multiple hours before they give up ans contact us, which leads to a removed magnetic layer.