XP and 98

[lukatmyshu]

Do you guys ever have problem with a floppy that's been formatted under 98 working in an XP enviornment? (I personally don't own any floppy's anymore, but my sister does). She was having some problems with her floppy drive, so I swapped hers out and gave her one I knew worked ..... but whenever she tries to read a disk formatted on a 98 machine it has issues ... but if she formats the floppy in XP it's fine ...

 

[DaveSimmons]

It's probably that one or both of the floppy drives has drifted out of alignment and it's a tracking problem (just like sometimes between 2 VCRs). W98 disks should be readable on any 9x/ME/NT/XP system.

 

[woodie1]

I haven't had any problems with my 98SE floppies on my XP rig.

 

[Twilling]

You may have a bad floopy interface on the motherboard. I experienced that recently with an old Asus AB board with the ALI chipset. I was having problems with the IDE and floppy interface.

 

[Jeff7]

See if you can buy a floppy drive cleaning kit somewhere - it's usually a floppy disk sized thing, with a cleaning pad in place of the magnetic disc, and a little bottle of isopropyl alcohol.
Floppy disks themselves are formatted using the same method (FAT) across any Windows OS.

 

[Rebels7]

Make sure that the XP machine is not NTFS!

 

[BennyD]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
See if you can buy a floppy drive cleaning kit somewhere - it's usually a floppy disk sized thing, with a cleaning pad in place of the magnetic disc, and a little bottle of isopropyl alcohol.
Floppy disks themselves are formatted using the same method (FAT) across any Windows OS.

prolly just as expensive to buy a new floppy =/

Make sure that the XP machine is not NTFS

makes no difference

 

[Hellblast]

I work in a computer lab and I sometimes found Win98 was more fault tolerant than Win2k and XP are. Sometimes Win2k didn't read a disk that was readable (with stuttering, but it worked) on Win98.

Hellblast

 

[BFG10K]

The file format is FAT16 for floppy disks so any Windows OS can read it. From what you say it does sound like an alignment difference between the two drives.

Make sure that the XP machine is not NTFS!

It's not possible to format a floppy disk with NTFS.

 

[BeauJangles]

"Floppy disk?" What's this you speak of? 🙂

 

[sandorski]

I've seen this happen years ago with fd's used by different systems. It's a real PITA when it happens and is yet another reason ti kill off the FD.

 

[wibambau]

One more vote for this being an alignment issue. Not a guarantee, but likely. Also - the floppy disk file system is FAT12, which can be read by both FAT-based and NTFS systems.