I have a couple of 3.5 INCH floppy diskettes which I need to read. When I put the diskettes into a floppy drive and select it in My Computer, I get the response "The disk is not FORMATTED do you want to format it now?"

I know that at one TIME there were files on the disks. There are very old in computer terms some around 18 years. I realize that at some time while in storage they could have been erased by a magnet r something. I was wondering if anyone out there knows of any software that can show me what is on the disk? I wasn't sure if they were created on a 16 bit SYSTEM if they could be read on a 32 bit system. I realize that what the error message is telling me is that there is no FAT table or anything set up. Did Microsoft change the diskette format over time?

Thanks for any help.

Greg18-years old, you're fortunate the disk(s) haven't self-destructed!

See MS KB140060

Good luckdepends on your os maybe if you do an error checking that it may help, not for sure but it did help fix my one disk.Yeah, I realize I'm lucky they made it to me. Thanks for the help. I'll try these two suggestions and see what happens.

GregJust the natural aging of the material in floppy disks, plus the effect of cosmic rays on the recording surface, cause floppy disks to "Forget".
They were never intended to be "Permanent" storage.

There is probably still some amount of recording on those OLD disks, but that level is lower than the drive is able to sense.
If you had different drives to try the disks on, you might find a drive that could read the disks.

Good Luck,