Data doldrums!

[jmhcs]

A friend brought me a floppy today that his wife has been working on for months with no backup onto a hard drive, CD or anything else. After the appropriate lecture about backup, we got down to the business of trying to recover data but had no luck.

The data was originally in a .wps format but somehow she then saved it in a .rtf format so now it looks like book.wps.rtf. It cannot be read by Word, notepad, or wordpad. OS was WME and I believe Works was the Word Processor. We tried a scan disk on the floppy which identifies the errors but we are reluctant to do a fix unless we can predict the outcome.

Does anyone know of a recovery tool that can be used to recover, even in raw format???:( :(

[jrobbinson]

Go to start-settings-folder option-view and uncheck hide file extensions for known file types. this will allow you to change the extension of it or at least remove the .rtf. part making it book.wps so the original proge can open it.

[sm8000]

While you're at it, try to copy the data onto your hard drive.

[jmhcs]

Copying the data to the hard drive is a great suggestion -- but it won't copy. That has become part of the problem. I really believe this file is toast but thought I would ask for other ideas.:( :(

[rmanet]

there are raw recovery tools, none of 'em free and even the demo or trialware versions usually won't let you "recover" a file

the disk may be toast but you probably still have parts of the file you can see - I had a similar problem with some MAC files that I needed to "see" even though they had been written so long ago I couldn't find even a commercial converter for the version of whatever word processor they used

you can try a hex editor if you're just trying to get to content - it would be tedious but hope this helps? :t

try this one (http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi32/xvi32.htm) or look around - there's plenty of 'em out there

[Eirik]

This reply may be a bit late, but I thought you might want to try the "Recreate text from all file formats" feature in the "Open File" dialog in MS Word. (Don't know the exact English wording of the file format option, since I use the Swedish version, but it should be something like that).

I've successfully recovered a bunch of old files with that, including Works. Of course, you won't get any of the formatting, but the text will be there, providing the files aren't too corrupted.