A "recovery" program that cannot even be told the drive letter isn't something I'd trust with any disk.

It would be wise to try and create an image of the disk first, *before* you try any recovery tools on the disk itself - especially if it's already started going kaput.
Hardware solutions like a KryoFlux/SuperCard Pro are best for that, but for software-only I'd go with disk2img in both "track-at-a-time" and "recovery" modes (see the readme), and then ImageDisk.

For recovery/repair, my best results have been with Anadisk, but the process is rather low-level and requires work on the user's part so YMMV.

VileR wrote on 2020-10-20, 14:53:

A "recovery" program that cannot even be told the drive letter isn't something I'd trust with any disk. […]
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A "recovery" program that cannot even be told the drive letter isn't something I'd trust with any disk.

It would be wise to try and create an image of the disk first, *before* you try any recovery tools on the disk itself - especially if it's already started going kaput.
Hardware solutions like a KryoFlux/SuperCard Pro are best for that, but for software-only I'd go with disk2img in both "track-at-a-time" and "recovery" modes (see the readme), and then ImageDisk.

For recovery/repair, my best results have been with Anadisk, but the process is rather low-level and requires work on the user's part so YMMV.

Excellent info. I remember using disk2img way back in the day, but search engines are so busted nowadays that it queues up a bunch of garbage relatively unrelated to "actually" recovering data

EDIT: For instance on the hardware side I was only getting Zoom floppy matches, no mention of the KryoFlux. I suppose floppy recover is more desirable at this point on C64, but still

Onyx Jaguar wrote on 2020-10-20, 23:35:

search engines are so busted nowadays that it queues up a bunch of garbage relatively unrelated to "actually" recovering data

Yep... it gets progressively worse, too. I'm pretty sure a lot of it has to do with google's recent steps to demote HTTP-only content and promote HTTPS. That effectively destroys the visibility of older websites, so relevant information to what we do here is relegated to obscurity.

Good luck with the disk! Would be interested to know if you successfully archive it.

Floppy disks that start throwing general errors usually aren't going to give you much through a standard PC drive. The magnetic layer deteriorates with age, and every time the head scrapes over it you risk losing more. At that point, software recovery tools don't add value because the drive physically can't read the data.

Professional labs use specialized hardware that bypasses the limitations of consumer drives, pulling the raw flux data and reconstructing it. SalvageData is one of the few that still deals with floppies, and they've been able to get files off disks that I thought were unrecoverable

kevin223 wrote on 2025-09-11, 01:45:

Floppy disks that start throwing general errors usually aren't going to give you much through a standard PC drive. The magnetic layer deteriorates with age, and every time the head scrapes over it you risk losing more. At that point, software recovery tools don't add value because the drive physically can't read the data.

At one point I modified some drives to have less head pressure which helped, but not always.
Strongly urge imaging what you can, IMD will let you "keep bad sectors", and every time you try, you might get some better.

Also strongly recomment giving the drive(esp heads) a good cleaning first! - this will not only help head contact/reliable reading,
but will also remove "little hard bits" of physical corruption which can cause accelerated damage.

Btw: I've the author of ImageDisk, and may be able to offer other help/answers if needed!

Dave