Multiple floppy drive failures

[Grovebaby]

This is the strangest thing ever. A while back I bought a new HDD. tried to use the transfer utility on the floppy and it would not work. took the FDD out of my other pc and that didn't work either. put the fdd back in the other pc and no read. tried a dos boot disk. no good. thought I had 2 bad Fdd's at the same time. Brought one home from work. no good. So now I have three Fdd's that won't work in 2 pc's, one with XP the other with 98. Finally I gave up. Speed ahead to today. At work we use a data aquisition software that runs on unix. The pc's are 2 partition the other partition is windows. Try to use the backup utilty on the unix side and guess what. the Fdd dosen't work. Booted to windows no good there with a dos boot disk. Tried 3 more pc's and the floppy's didn't read!!! What is going on!!! I don't transfer anything from home to work. Is there some kind of conspiracy that I haven't heard about? This is really spooky.

 

[jackschmittusa]

It is possible that the ones at work are disabled to prevent people from putting unauthorized stuff on the machines. As for home, putting the power cable on wrong can kill a drive.

 

[isaacmacdonald]

yep, the stupid power cables aren't keyed well. I've killed a floppy with that. But also remember that floppy disks don't age well. If these are old disks, they're probablly f*cked.

 

[Grovebaby]

The ones at work are under my control so they aren't locked out. And they have been in the pc's since the last time they worked so the cables are okay. I remember now that I ended up formating my home pc, and the fdd still no read. Oh yeah, I just found another this morning. first one I tried. I guess I have to get a new one and try it. I just can't believe that this would all happen at the same time at different places. my pc's at home are only a couple of years old.

 

[Insidious]

I've had floppy "wierdness" for some time here as well.

I use Ghost to back up (weekly) and from time to time it won't boot to the floppy without I/O errors being reported in the POST screen.

I really haven't figured out what the problem is. Actually, I'm nearly superstitious about it at this point.

I've tried using power from a PSU branch with nothing else on it, tried and re-tried checking the FDD connections and ended up just blaming it on
bad floppies because in each instance, I was able to get going by making a new ghost floppy.

At one point, it even appeared that leaving the side cover off the machine helped. (Which made me believe that perhaps I was jostling the ribbons or power wires somehow.)

So, here is where I've left it...... I have NO IDEA why I have been throwing so many floppies away. My best guess at this point is that newer systems have some kind of weird propensity to corrupt floppies on boot. (Yes, I know this is ridiculous, but it's all I got )

I avoid using the FDD when I can, and when I must use it, I just make sure I have extra disks.

-Sid

 

[Grovebaby]

yeah I'm about to go crazy. The newest of the affected are about 2 years old. I've got about 8 bad ones now. Out of may be 10 checked. I notice that none of my Dell machines are bad. So far only Gateways and my 2 home builts are crapped out.

 

[Mist]

I bought a brand new floppy drive, installed it and it didn't work, so I took it back to the shop as faulty and got a replacement. Tried that, it didn't work either, so now, I don't even use one at all.

Blank CDs are so cheap now, that anything I ever needed a floppy for can now be done with a CD, so long as your bios supports booting from CD, which most do now anyway.

Michael.

 

[Grovebaby]

Problem is that my unix work pc's don't support cdrom. And the HDD utility that I spoke of came on floppy.

 

[jackschmittusa]

You can try using a floppy cleaner kit. This has occasionaly worked for me with drives in a dirty enviorment. I Would also mention that if you are going to buy a new drive, the only ones I have ever had to replace are Mitsumis. I have taken to using Teac and Sony floppies in the rigs I build and repair.