I accidentally placed a faulty floppy disk in my disk drive and the metal cover which goes over the top of the disk came off in the drive. I can’t place any disks in the drive and it is getting very inconvenient. I have attempted to extract it myself but I think I am digging myself into an even bigger hole. What would be the best procedure to extract it from the drive?

This is going to happen sooner or later if you use the computer disk drive often enough. Firstly, unplug the computer lead from the wall (to avoid electrocution). Then ready yourself with a thin screwdriver and a pair of tweezers or thin pliers. Use the screwdriver to prop open the flap of the disk drive and use the tweezers (or pliers) to extract the metal cover. Make sure that you are gentle as you don’t want to either push the cover further into the drive or damage the drive. It would also be a good idea to test your disk drive to make sure that the metal cover did not damage the drive physically during its duration in your drive. You can do this by copying files to a disk and then trying to access them off the disk. If all is well, then you should have no problems doing this. However, if problems do occur, then retest it with other disks and if the problem still persists, you may have to get a new disk drive. This is a relatively inexpensive matter as disk drives are very cheap.