My Floppy Disk Has Bad Sectors
Symptoms of Bad Sectors
Floppy disks are slowly losing ground to email, flash drives and burners, but they are still used fairly often to transfer small data files and documents between computers when nothing else is available, or on older systems. The problem with floppy disks (and floppy drives) is that most of today's are made cheaply at best, and will go bad after a relatively short amount of time. The complication is that floppy disks will go gradually, slowly deteriorating until the data stored on one sector becomes bad, and you can no longer read the information from the disk. Errors will range from "unable to read from sector xxxx" to "Failure on INT 24" or "Cannot open file" or "General failure reading drive A:."
How to Fix Bad Sectors
First, check the floppy disk in a different computer to ensure the computer's drive is good, or try a new disk in your computer's drive. Once you have confirmed that the disk is indeed the problem, it's time to fix it the best you can.
If the data on the disk is recoverable, backed up or nonessential, try an unconditional format on the disk. This will clear the disk, mark the bad sectors and make it useable for a little while longer. (See the Disk Format guide for help).
Next, run Scandisk on the disk. If you're running Windows 98, restart the computer in MS-DOS mode and run it from there. Scandisk is amazingly efficient when used properly. To run it from DOS, type scandisk A: and run the surface scan as well. In Windows, either right-click the floppy drive in My Computer, select Properties, Tools, and the Scandisk button there, or Start->Run "scandisk", or Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Scandisk. It might be called Disk Checker on some systems.
Once you have Scandisk up and running, select the floppy drive and then go to Options in Windows 98. Select the options that allow all errors to be fixed automatically, scan for bad sectors, and save all lost clusters to files. You can open these in Notepad and delete them if you don't need them. In Windows XP, just check both boxes and start it. If any error dialog boxes come up, select "Fix" or "Fix Automatically."
If the disk is not recoverable, it's time to call up a third party file recovery program. If you don't have one, or it doesn't work either, it's time to buy a new floppy disk.