Strange floppy issue

OK, I'm hoping that someone out there can answer this very simple question. Why have I not been able to find a working floppy drive/disk in the last two years?
Is it just me? Or did floppy drives simply stop working on XP machines?

I have tried, over the last couple of years or so, to use floppy disks, and I have not found a floppy drive, or a single floppy that would actually work. This is not only on my own machines, but on my friends' machines as well. All under Windows XP.

Every time I try, and I have tried brand new floppy drives, I get the error "The disk in drive A is not formatted, Do you want to format it now?" When I click "yes" I always get this message: "The disk in drive A cannot be formatted ". I have tried old disks and brand new disks. None of them work. What's going on with this? Anyone????

 

It could well be that in your BIOS where you enable your Floppy that you actually have to set the capacity of your Floppy in your case 1.44MB as there are more older sizes still listed on some Motherboards.

 

Be careful if you are putting the disks into one particular drive first, it might be "destroying" them. What I have seen is that a drive may have been loaded with a disk that is breaking down (the magnet layer actual starts to peel off) and the media gets coated onto the read/write heads. When you put the next disk in, it will get corrupted and become unusable.

I threw the "damaged" floppy drive away and replaced it. I also got a floppy drive cleaning set and ran it on any other drives that I may have used the "contaminated" disks on.

Floppy disks (the media on them) will break down over time, so be very wary of putting old disks into a drive. If you have old disks look at copying them to new ones before there is a chance of the media breaking down (and it is probably a factor of the quality of the disks in the first place, low quality will break down quicker). Now, I will make copies (although most of mine are utility disks and can be made from a downloaded program) and if I find one that can't be read, I will mark it as possibly bad or just dispose of it. I might test it later on an old drive that I won't need if it gets fouled with media.

Matt
PS If a floppy disk seems to be acting strangely at all or you want to test them, run Error Checking (CHKDSK) on them and scan the disk surface for bad sectors.

 

Help

I know some replies have been posted to my thread, but I cannot see them. Why not? When I click on the thread title, I only see my own posting with a reply box below it. I don't see any of your replies.
Even if I click on the number of replies received, I go back to my own posting only - no replies are shown.

Could somebody plse email me w/ an explanation on how to view replies to my own posts?

I'm ususally pretty computer and internet savvy, but this just doesn't compute w/me for some reason.

Thanks,
cinjeffp

Nevermind, all the replies popped into view when I posted this reply to my own thread.

 

Yes, I checked that. It is set as 3.5 floppy 1.44 Mbs.
I did find, while working on another issues w/my computer, that a spare drive I had lying around would work at bootup w/a win 98 startup disk. After I booted into XP, though, I got the same error as posted above, using that same drive and the same floppy. :-0

 

No, there are no errors in device manager. I have tried uninstalling both the floppy drive and the floppy drive controller. Is there a place that I can download that driver from the internet and replace the one that is being used. I'm thinking the one I have must be corrupted or something. fdc.sys I think it is called. Is that right??
Thanks,
Cinjeffp

 

Can't run anything on them, the system just tells me that the floppy isn't formatted and do I want to format it now. Unless, there is a command line option that might bypass this error and scan the disk??

I'm not very familiar w/running command line commands, so maybe you could give me a clue how to do that, if it is an option for bypassing the error above.

Thanks,
Cinjeffp

 

I don't use the command line (CHKDSK), I use Error Checking. Go to My Computer and right-click on the Floppy (A: ) drive, select Properties -> Tools tab -> Error Checking. Put checks in the boxes.

As I was saying, a bad floppy drive might actually be destroying the disks (by corrupting magnetic media).

Matt

 

Hmmm, did that but not sure what it actually did. I clicke on the start button after putting checks in the boxes, I heard the computer access the floppy, but that was it. No error messages, no progress bars, no results of test, etc.

Cinjeffp

 

It sounds a little like they are corrupted. If you think a particular drive is causing it, isolate it. Last time I checked, a new floppy drive (for a desktop) only cost pocket change.

 

£7.53 for a Sony unit from Dabs, so yes, very little

That is an internal one, as well.