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Data recovery from floppy disks, Iomega Zip drives, JAZ drives and Syquest Sparq SyJet EzFlyer cartridge drives

Zip, Jaz and EzFlyer disk drives

The logical structures of Zip, Jaz and EzFlyer cartridges are very similar to that of hard disks. Therefore, the reasons for data loss from Zip, Jaz and EzFlyer drives are essentially the same as that of a hard disk - inaccessible areas of the drive, invalid FAT, unreadable sectors etc.

Error messages produced by corrupt cartridges include;

• Invalid or corrupt FAT
• Invalid partition
• Invalid sector
• Cannot find file or program
• Invalid Command.com
• Disk I/O Error
• Clicking or Scraping noises' or Click of Death' (CoD)

The recovered data is returned on CD-ROM.

Floppy disks ... magnetic risks ... dust, grit

Always keep floppy disks away from sources of magnetism. One often overlooked yet devastating source of magnetism is Mobile Phones. They frequently produce electromagnetic radiation pulses as they determine their position within the network. The pulses are often much stronger during an actual transmission, especially in an area of bad reception. One single EMR pulse is enough to zap a floppy with the data completely destroyed resulting in an unusable floppy disk.

Other sources of magnetism are metal-detector scanners in airports. If you have to take a floppy through an airport, remember to place it in the tray before going through the metal detector or scanner.

One source of physical damage is dust or grit entering the metal sleeve that protects the disk's surface. Never pull the sleeve back.

Typical floppy disk errors are:

• The floppy in drive A is not formatted
• The floppy is not recognised by the computer
• It makes unusual noises when trying to access the floppy
• When you get error messages trying to read a floppy, along the lines of; cannot read sector, Invalid media, cannot find file, invalid disk, etc. are all indicative of a corrupt floppy disk, and in most cases we can recover at least some, if not all of the original data.