Floppy works in DOS, not in XP

[lenknermj]

Hey all,

I have a strange one here. Before I get started, I'm a veteran computer technician, and this one just plain has me stumped...I just didn't want anyone tellin' me to flip the floppy cable 180 degrees...lol

So, here's the deal.

I can boot from a floppy diskette, however when I try to access it within Windows XP Pro SP1, I get the message "The disk in drive a: is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?". When I attempt to format it, it says that the diskette cannot be formatted, and gives no reason why. According to the Microsoft Knowledge base, this can happen on floppies which were not formatted on an XP machine because it might be lacking some info in the MBR. However, I've tried formatting a disk with one of my other XP Pro systems, and it still cannot read it.

I have an Asus P4S333 mobo. I'm using round cables for all the drives. Below is a list of any devices I have installed that are not integrated with the mobo...I figure that the integrated devices should NOT cause conflict.

Promise FastTrack SX4000 IDE RAID controller
Intel Pro 100 NIC
Asus GeForce 2 MX400 AGP video card
Adaptec AHA-2940 SCSI
Brand new Generic floppy drive (didn't work on the one it replaced, either)

I seem to remember the diskette working quite some time ago, when I first built the machine. Furthermore, the hardware listed above has been installed since day 1. However, I don't need the floppy disk often, and don't know exactly when it stopped working. The only thing that I can think of is that the XP Service Pack did something goofy and perhaps that driver is not allowing XP to access the disk. I've tried deleting all instances of the FLPYDISK.SYS file from the system, and replacing it with the non-SP1 file. However, XP apparently has some access to it on the net, because when the floppy drive is redetected, it is installed with the SP1 version.

Oh yeah, and the worst part is that I didn't archive the files when I applied the SP.

Anyone know what might be going on here? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. I really don't feel like spending $40 on a USB floppy for occasional use.

Thanks,
Mark

 

[lenknermj]

It works again.

Wow...doesn't it figure. Take the time to ask everyone for help, and you stumble across the solution right after you post the question.

For those of you who want to know what happened, apparently the SCSI card (Adaptec AHA-2940) was set to support INT13h devices. Since I use that card for my scanner, I disabled that setting...and wouldn't ya know, the dang floppy started workin' again.

Weird.