[GLLUG] 3" floppy

[Richard Houser]

> Hey Steve, you are right, it is 3", and if you find out it is still 
> alive, please let me know, my friend need to convert or print the 
> document with a certain urgency.

It won't help with the physical recovery, but if you can get the bits 
off the disk and into an image, I've had good luck recovering Word 
document contents from raw floppy disk images.  It takes a bit of 
effort, but even 1.44MB image isn't too big to manually go through in a 
couple hours.  Due to the age, I would expect these files to have much 
less binary content and thus be that much easier to recover.

Basically, what typically happened in the situations I delt with was 
that the Word 97 (or close) release didn't use the Windows OS calls to 
handle accessing floppy disks.  If you opened Word and then later 
swapped the disk and then saved, Word would overwrite parts of the 
filesystem on the second disk with the data raw copied from the first.