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Floppy Not Formatted

J

Jasper896

Junior Member
Hi,
This is a recurring problem. I put some excel worksheets on a floppy, used it for some 2 weeks, then suddently it asks me "Disk not formatted, do you want to format now?" When I check disk properties floppy shows up as RAW with 0 files. I tried to read the floppy from my Notebook with the same results. The last time this happened, I bought a new floppy drive. Now that I think about it, there was no need for a new floppy drive. What is the cause of this (I've used different floppies). Am running Win XP Pro, everything else works fine. What is or could be? Anyone had this or heard about this? Appreciate it and thanks.😕
 
Try this. In device manager, uninstall the floppy and the floppy controller. Windows will redetect on reboot. May solve the problem.
 
Is your notebook running XP too? Was the disk formatted in XP? Have you saved files from a non-XP OS at any point?

I have seen probs where XP doesn't recognised disks formatted/saved in non-XP OS's before.

Jamie
 
Floppies are just plain unreliable devices. Any external magnetic field can effect them, a spec of dust can also cause the disk surface to become scratched and the data in the scratched area to become unreadable.

 
Originally posted by: TheCorm
Is your notebook running XP too? Was the disk formatted in XP? Have you saved files from a non-XP OS at any point?

I have seen probs where XP doesn't recognised disks formatted/saved in non-XP OS's before.

Jamie
Click to expand...

That shouldn't matter. Floppies in Microsoft operating systems always use the same 12-bit FAT file system. A floppy formatted in Windows XP should read just fine in DOS v5.0.


Originally posted by: stevewm
Floppies are just plain unreliable devices. Any external magnetic field can effect them, a spec of dust can also cause the disk surface to become scratched and the data in the scratched area to become unreadable.
Click to expand...

Agreed. If my USB keychain device was bootable, I'd use it for BIOS upgrades easily. Of course, I'd probably have to create a RAMdisk to store the BIOS image on, assuming that's even safe - I've read that using a keychain drive to flash the BIOS can be risky. The USB port may be disabled briefly during the flashing process as various parts of the BIOS are overwritten. This can be very bad if the image is on a drive connected to that port.
I don't know how the system memory would be affected during a BIOS flash, so I can't be sure if a RAMdisk would be a good idea either.
Oh yeah, I brought up BIOS upgrades simply because that's about all I use my floppy drive for anymore. That, and maybe some system utilities that'll only run outside of Windows, like Memtest86.
 
Well, I get this from time to time at work when copying files onto floppy from an NT machine to be read on a 95 machine.

But the computers are covered in cast iron dust and the cooling slots are caked with it. On humid days they do all kinds of weird things. I can just imagine all that nice, moist cast iron dust laying on the motherboards. When they finally won't boot anymore they just get a new one!

I beg them to take off the covers and blow them out. But I guess they've got money to burn. General Motors.

 
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