First post, by GunKneeNeon
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I have a lot of old floppy disks that I want to read data from. However, none of them can be read successfully by my floppy drive. In Win98, it says that my floppy has not formatted and suggests me to format now. In MSDOS (entering by press F8 when booting then choose Command Prompt Only entry), it says General failure reading Drive A. I was thinking that my drive is dead and googling around to try to fix the hardware. But it's not! If I reformat the floppy, the drive functions very well. I can then do normal file manipulations smoothly. Now the problem is how I can read my old data using the drive. I find this explanation from other forum: ""General Failure" is a catchall error for floppy errors. It could mean that the boot sector doesn't conform to later DOS standards (you sometimes get this when you try to read a DOS 1 or 2 floppy on a later version of DOS)." This is not my case, I never used these disks under old versions of DOS or any other older systems, but it may be a clue that the boot sector of the disks have compatibility issues with my win98.
Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance!