Floppy Fiasco

Not certain where to post this. I hope you can assist me.

I still have data on floppy discs. Recently I put one in my external drive and opened the drive. There were about 5-6 fairly good sized files. I made the mistake of removing the disc and inserting a 2nd disc before I closed the window itemizing the contents of disc 1. When I went to close the window, the files were transfered to disc 2 (which already had about 5-6 tiny .text files.)

I've tried 2 different file recovery programs, Undelete Plus and PC Inspector, to locate the .txt files. Nothing.

When I checked the space used on each disc, disc 1 is 3/4 full while disc 2 is completely full, even though the only files that appear on disc 2 are the same files on disc 1.

I know the data is there.

 

I'm surprised that PC Inspector's file recovery program didn't rescue the files. This leads me to believe that maybe the data has been over-written, and the disk is reading as full due to an allocation table problem. You can try using Disk Investigator. It reads disks at a very low level and shows you the raw data. I'm not 100% sure that it works with floppies, though. It's free so I guess it's worth a try.
Disk Investigator http://www.majorgeeks.com/Disk_Investigator_d1341.html
There's lots of other free utilities you can try in the Data Recovery section here at Major Geeks. I don't think any of the 'undelete' type of tools will work, mainly because the data was not deleted. Here's some that caught my eye....
TestDisk http://www.majorgeeks.com/TestDisk_&_PhotoRec_d5561.html
Ultimate Data Recovery http://www.majorgeeks.com/Ultimate_Data_Recovery_d5336.html
SectorSpy http://www.majorgeeks.com/SectorSpyXP98_d2562.html
...and those are all free!
Good luck!

(I haven't necessarily used any of those programs, I just saw 'em and posted the links for you to maybe save you some time)