Back in the mid-1990's while I was working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, I had founded a company called ZeaSoft which produced laptop tracking software. The bulk of the marketing was done through a small Canadian company called Blue Xpertise. In any event, during that time I acquired a repertoire of tools for data recovery from hard drives and other media.
As a "service to the community", I can pull data off many types of old portable media for folks for a very nominal fee. It's not uncommon for people to have documents or data on old media that they never got around to pulling off while they still had a PC or Mac capable of reading that media,. If they could get that data, they would to "simply to have it". A classic example of this is "old research data" extracted from old media either to re-archive it on more modern media and/or to re-analyze it using more advanced data analysis tools than were available when the data was originally analyzed.
The media I have the tools to read, provided the media itself is undamaged, are:
5.25-inch floppy
5.25-inch formats I can extract files from or make disk
images of are:
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Windows &
MS-DOS
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Apple DOS 3.2 (13-sector)
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Apple DOS 3.3 (16-sector)
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Apple ProDOS
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Atari 810
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Calcomp Vistagraphics 4500
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Commodore 1541
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North Star MDS-A-D
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TI-99/4A
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Kaypro 2 CP/M 2.2
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Kaypro 4 CP/M 2.2
3-inch floppy
3-inch formats I can read:
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Windows &
MS-DOS
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Apple Macintosh
100MB Zip disks
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Windows
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Apple Macintosh
250MB Zip disks
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Windows
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Apple Macintosh
I typically charge $3 per disk depending on quantity, which is about 20% of what other places charge. Your original disks can be mailed back, or if you do not want them back, I'll shred them. If the disks prove unreadable, you won't be charged.
Under certain circumstances I can also read damaged floppy media at a sector level.
Extracted data can be zipped, encrypted and emailed back, or burned onto a CD/DVD and mailed back. Contact me if you have any questions. Payment is most easily done via PayPal, although I can also process credit cards directly via Square.
I am no longer willing to do data recovery from hard drives as my tool set is pretty old at this point, and its not worth it for me to update them.