IN line with Jasen Betts VERY helpful suggestion that one should slide the
write protection tab on for a floppy, or .. I guess past the tab on an even
older one, before attempting to recover data from it, I offer another idea.

If you have OS/2 and are attempting to work with data on heritage floppies
for recovery under OS/2 ... that same idea is very important to make the
diskettes read-only as well, but for a possibly different but similar
reason.

In the case of OS/2, if you create or edit a file with an editor, such as
the Qedit Semipro editor for OS/2 on a floppy, and save the file to the
disk, OS/2 writes and Extended Attribute file to that diskette!  The file
is named "EA DATA. SF", set with the "rhsa" attributes
turned on.  Obviously the more ordinary directory view job won't see this
file.  Since it has embedded spaces in the file name and so on, disposing
of it isn't quite so easy, plus the edited file has those Extended
Attribute bytes for it tied to the FAT and so on.  I'd guess most of the
time this would be irrelevant. But just to be on the safe side, I'd think
about this.

In that I'm an OS/2 house here, these things go un-noticed, for the most
part to me as n OS/2 user.  But I can see where it just might be that some
other file system and operating system game which is not OS/2, in trying to
work with such a diskette, might get things snarled up.  So Jasen's
suggestion was worthwhile to not just the WIN user trying to recover or
look at a diskette with a hex editor, but I think to OS/2 users as well.


--> Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)

Mike {at} 1:117/3001

--- Maximus/2 3.01