ARCHIVED: Using Norton Utilities on my Macintosh computer, how can I recover a damaged floppy disk?

If you have a copy of Norton Utilities, you can use it to try to recover a floppy disk on your Mac OS X computer.

Note: If you are running Mac OS X or higher, you can detect and repair problems in your hard drive by running Norton Utilities 7.x, or by booting from the Norton Utilities Startup CD.

Before you begin, be sure to back up all the good data on your disk to another disk or disks. Then, follow the instruction manual that came with your copy of Norton Utilities to diagnose and recover the disk. Following is a brief example of how you would do this with Norton Utilities version 5.0.2:

1. Launch Norton Utilities by double-clicking its icon, or by restarting your Mac with your Norton Disk Doctor startup CD while pressing the c key on your keyboard. When the first screen comes up, click Norton Disk Doctor to launch it. It is always best to use a different, good disk to recover files from a bad disk.
2. Choose the drive you want to examine and click Examine. Norton Utilities will go through a series of tests to verify that your drive is working correctly and that the files on your disk are in good shape. During these tests, if Norton finds any problems it can fix, let Norton fix them.
3. If Norton finds errors it cannot fix, it will advise you how to proceed. Follow these instructions carefully. Back up or recover as much of your data as possible. Do not use the damaged disk anymore. There might be some merit in keeping the damaged disk until you have changed the files on the good disk so much that going back to the bad disk to recover files would be useless.