My computer was sick and I had to take it to the doctor. Before doing so, I put my important files onto a floppy. When I went to open the floppy the computer couldn't read it. I received a message stating that the disc wasn't formatted. What can I do now to retreive the information I put on the disc?
Thank you.

Uh Oh! I have had that happen to me and usually because the disk wasn't compatible with the computer I was using. The one thing you DON'T want to do is to click "format disk" because if you do that then you will lose anything and everything you had already saved to it. The only thing I can suggest is to try opening your disk on another computer. If it indeed opens on another computer than save it to a fresh disk. If it doesn't - think you might be up a river....
Good luck!

that the problem is with the disk drive. If the drive that wrote the original floppy was far enough out of alignment, then other drives might be unable to "see" the formatting marks, and decide that the disk is unformatted. Conversely, if the drive you're trying to use now is out of alignment, then it may see the disk as unformatted when it's fine.

Either way, what I would suggest is that you find another floppy drive and try to read the disk there. If it works, then chances are that the floppy drive on your computer is the problem. If you have it aligned, you can probably get it to read your disk.

If you try two or three other drives, though, and none of them can read it, then it begins to appear that the problem was with the original drive. In that case, the only thing I know to do is put the disk back in the original drive, which should be able to read it. If that drive has since been aligned, then you may be up a creek.

There are professional organizations that recover data from damaged disks. I suspect that something like this would be child's play for them. They are, however, generally not cheap. If the "other drive" thing doesn't work, you might check with one of them.

As you both suggested, I tried opening it on two different computers with no luck.

Anybody have a life preserver?..I can't swim!

Thanks a bunch...Smile.

Sorry Susan but I have no other suggestions unless you want to invest some money into taking the disk or your computer to a tech. If you have Norton System Doctor you may be able to find that info on your hard-drive somewhere. I'm not sure but it's worth a try.

Since the other suggestions (which is what I would have initially suggested) didn't work, you might want to consider one of the data recover services. They advertise in the backs of some PC magazines. While they more often service hard disks that have crashed, I suspect they've got the tools to extract any data that's on your floppy.

One final thought: Any possibility at all that you somehow swapped disks and have been testing out a blank unformatted one? (Not likely in any case, I know, especially nowadays when even new unused floppies generally come formatted.)

I just had the same problem. My floppy drive got fried & I had to buy a new one. They aren't very epxensive. Mine was only $10.00 at a local computer store.