Windows – Error 0x800706F9 when trying to copy files off floppy disk

file-transferfloppywindows 10

I have some old files on 3.5" floppy disks (probably written on Windows 2000 or XP) that I need to copy over to my Windows 10 hard drive. Some of the files are MS Office documents, some pictures, and a few executable files.

I have a USB 2.0 external floppy drive that has worked fine in the past. I insert each disk and can browse the files, but when I attempt to copy them, only a few copy. With some of the files, I get the following error:

To attempt to remedy this, I ran a chkdsk on the floppy, but it returned no errors:

Is there anything I can try other than attempting to spin up a Windows 2000 VM?

Best Answer

"Error 0x800706F9" usually means "The disk media is not recognized. It may not be formatted". There is a possibility that the floppy disk has been corrupted.

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Best Floppy Drive for reading old floppies

I would say if the disks are good, any drive should work. I would find a second drive and test them, kind of like a "2nd opinion". If they're still not reading, then it's probably the disks.

As well, if the disks were stored near a magnet (speaker, etc), it's possible something like that could have corrupted the data.

Restoring ancient zip file spanning floppy disks: pkzipfix equivalents

I had some partial success and was able to get some files out of the archive. First, I created an "fd" directory to mount those floppy images, then for each floppy image, I did the following:

sudo mount -o loop floppyxx.img fd
cat fd/myzip.zip >> combined.zip
sudo umount fd

Once I had a combined archive, I did this:

unzip -FF combined.zip

There are fewer files I was able to extract than I'd hoped. I'm still open for seeing if there's a more effective method of repairing a multi-disk zip archive.

Best Answer

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Best Floppy Drive for reading old floppies

Restoring ancient zip file spanning floppy disks: pkzipfix equivalents

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