wrote in message
...
On Sunday, 5 November 2017 00:38:35 UTC, wrote:
On Sat, 4 Nov 2017 18:15:25 -0000, "Ian Field"
wrote:
"Bob F" wrote in message
news

I have an old floppy disk that I need to recover the files for an old
piece of equipment from. Can anyone recommend any program that would
likely be able to recover the files from this floppy disk. This is, I
suspect, just a problem from age of the disk.

Norton Utilities NDD works well for recovering floppies.

You need the old 16 bit NU suite - I'd probably build up an old 16 bit
PC to
go with it as well. You can still find DOS online.

Recent issues of the windows OS restrict port access and will probably
heavily impact NU - if you want to use Win; You may have to go as far
back
as Win ME.

I'd use Win98se, not WinME.
If you have an old computer to use for this, go to a search engine and
search for "Abandonware". I found one site (maybe more) that has the old
versions of Norton Utilities, Win98, and all the Dos versions you will
ever need. All free to download. I have to question the legality of
this, but I am not going to worry about it. Some of the software on
there is truly abandoned. The companies no longer exist. But I do
question the legality of having Win98 on there and maybe even Norton
stuff.

There is another site which is called bootdisk.com. There you can get
everything you need to make a Dos bootdisk.

Putting 98se on an old machine originally licensed for it should be ok.

Putting it on a modern machine will get you in trouble from the get-go, it
won't run. 98 can't cope with 512M RAM, nor address 128G HDD, nor does
it do NTFS or ext3/4. Nor does it natively handle USB adequately. The good
news is there is a long list of patches available to make it all work,
some from MS some 3rd party. The bad news is that applying them all will
take well north of a day's work. So put it on old hardware if you can find
it.

Can't see any reason why DOS wouldn't work, but it'd only be able to see a
tiny fraction of the installed memory - not that its going to be much of a
problem if all you want to do is play with floppies.

Most of the boards I get have changed hands a few times - they've been
arriving with no floppy port for a while now.