floppy disk

on my computer no matter what it will not read floppy disks. It always says i must format the disk to read it. Ive checked the drivers to see if it was enabled and it saying it operational and working fine, does anyone have any ideas.

 

Maybe you need a new floppy drive.

 

You also might try cleaning the drive by gently spraying a can of air through the front door. Floppy drives get used so little these days that they tend to accumulate a lot of dirt.

If all these suggestions fail, I'm with RayH on the 'new drive' suggestion.

Cheers,

ICE

 

I got those errors on a build recently. I used that method that Pete suggests. Other things to try:
Reseat the connection of the data cable at the motherboard.
There may be two connectors on the cable, try the other (make sure the cable is around the right way...side with red marking goes to pin 1.
If you are happy to do some detective work, then try borrowing another data cable to try.
See if it will read using DOS. Say from a boot/startup disk.

Are the floppies old? They may be starting to break down.

The floppies haven't been close to a magnet...like a magnetised screwdriver or the speakers for your PC?

Matt

 

If you have the floppy in the boot sequence, it may have worn itself out. I had a floppy drive I never used much go bad from the bootups. I no longer have them in the boot sequence unless I need it.

 

It looks to me like a hardware fault - I think a replacement drive will be the solution.

However, one thing I have seen with floppies that might be worth considering is head alignment. Occasionally you can get a floppy drive with its heads misaligned. The result of this is that it will happily write disks and read disks that it has written, but will not read disks from other machines (and they won't read disk that this drive has written).

Are you having problems reading all floppy disks? Have you tried disks from a number of sources?

 

yea sorry people, I've been really busy working on my websites (even though i dont know much about computers, i know plenty about server side things such as php, mysql etc) that I forgot i posted. Im using a laptop, Im not sure how to take it apart. I know how to do it all on desktops, im going to turn it off soon and pull it apart, it may be disconnected.