Floppy Problems 2

[shmoes]

Hey,

I've noticed recently, when i use a floppy in one computer and take it to another computer they're often reading in another computer as "not formatted" ... yet other floppies work .. etc etc .. it sometimes seems like my "bad" floppies are becoming more and more .. Almost like sometimes it when it writes on it, it's messing up the floppy.. because it'll work .. i'll take it to the other computer ... it will say it's not formated .. i'll bring it back to the original computer it was on .. and it now doesn't work ... It's happened with many disks and different brands.

this a familiar scenario for anyone?

Thx


~Shmoes

I lay claim to nothing and everything. My words may be wisdom or disaster. In the end you make a choice. Noone is perfect.

 

[edfair]

Starting symptoms for a drive going bad. Then it will get so it won't recognize a floppy it just formatted. Then it will quit formatting.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[bcastner]

Familiar to me if you do this sequence:

Format on Win9x, write to floppy.
Take to XP, shows as not formatted, or eventually permits the mount. Errors occur.

I have heard it occurs if the second step is Win ME, but cannot confirm it.

The explanation someone offered rings true enough that I will repeat it, but I do not know if it is in fact true, and this does not preclude ed fair's suggestion above:

XP/ME writes during format an disk type identfier byte that while available in earlier Windows versions, was not used. ME writes but does not use the byte during a mount. XP writes and uses the byte during a format and during a mount operation. If the byte is missing it will believe the disk is not formatted.

 

[shmoes]

I appreciate the responses,

Good theory Bcastner, but all the systems here are on win2k machines.

The 3.5 drives are not that old, and it's not isolated to one computer which is why i thought the drive going bad was not the option .. guess i could have a few drives going bad.

Thx tho guys

~Shmoes

I lay claim to nothing and everything. My words may be wisdom or disaster. In the end you make a choice. Noone is perfect.

 

[John Lewis]

'The 3.5 drives are not that old' . . .

There's your problem. Over the years, the importance of the floppy has diminished. Average user thinks the floppy is a place to store toothpicks. Software isn't packaged that way anymore, if you need to move a small file you email it, larger file you burn to a CD (probably won't fit on a floppy anyway).

Manufacturers recognize this and the drive for cheaper machines wins. Some machines are being shipped without floppies at all.

The cheaper drives in use today have heads that are less powerful, so the track that they record on is not as wide. The centerline of the tracks is still the same, in theory.

Would not cause a problem by itself, but the stepping motors used to position the head are also a much cheaper version, as is the spiraled shaft that moves the head back and forth. End result is alignment varies more from drive to drive at a time when it is more critical.

To sum things up, the drives used in new computers are (and have been for a couple of years) pieces of . . . well they are cheap. Good replacement drives from Teac on all of your machines will solve the problem.

 

[bcastner]

mhkwood,

I like your theory a lot.

 

[SoloX]

I also have the same problem with my floppy disks not reading. Some disk will read and some won't. My floppy disks use to work fine but after I reinstalled XP i have started to have theses problems. My floppy drives are from older computers and worked fine in the older machines. I have put the floppy drives back into older machines and they still work fine. I think it has something to do with XP. I have built several computers and have used old floppy drives in all of them and have had theses problems. I have found that most older floppy disks will work in theses drives but newer ones will not. So I am also kind of ify on the fact that it might be a bad drive but who knows.

 

[jurgen36]

Had the same problems with many machines. Did set the Cmos to 2.8 Mb floppy drives. This seems to fix the problems. Why this is so I do not pretend to know. Also it seems to show up more on Win Xp. The drives work normal if I boot up in Sun Solaris. Again I do not know why. Regards

Jurgen

 

[mar0092]

since I upgraded fm windows 98 2nd edition to win XP PROFESSIONAL, I am having problems with the A drive (floppy)
A:\is not accessible and also with the D drive (cd drive) will not read the cd disk.

 

[allteltec]

I Move small scripts between 9 to 10 differt computers, and I have found if you try to up date or write files to the same floppy from different computers you are probably going to have floppys go bad. I think this is do to poor head alinement on some of the floppys drives. I try to only write to a floppy on the same computer it was formated in. I try not to use floppys very often because thay are very on reliable. An if you have old floppys that where pre Formated win 3.1 days windows XP will say thay are not formated do to missing info in boot sector, this can be fixed by useing a win9x system and a disk editing software and fixing the boot sector info.

 

[bcastner]

I am with alltelltec,
I had a neighbor come over and plead for help with here daughter's school project. She had been saving this critical end-school year project to floppy on her laptop, and then dumped a soda on the keyboard.

I grabbed the floppy and tried to read it on several of my machines without luck; the errors were numerous and varied, but most often it reported the diskette was not formatted.

I scanned with two very powerful recover utilities, and they all gave draconian warnings about how unrecoverable the disk was.

I then took the floppy drive from the Dell notebook that had been saturated with a soda, shoved it into my Dell notebook, and inserted the floppy drive. It read it without issue.

My long standing opinion: floppy drives are cheap pieces of junk anymore. They used to be a fairly reliable data storage means. Do not use floppies for reliable data transfer between systems. They, as alltelltec noted above, are fine on the same system.

And if you not discovered the virtues yet of USB pen-drives, go out an buy one.

 

[iguessifihaveto]

I had the same problems. If your using the same type oif computer(brand, win edition, etc) then its ur floppy and i would suggest changing it before ur motherboard goes bad. If it already hasnt gone bad. Try another floppy drive then if that doesnt work ur motherboard is currutped . Then if ur motherboard is currupted dont try any other floppy drive.

 

[zaarenoc]

When I first put a floppy in it will read fine. I remove that floppy and insert another and it will read the info from the previous floppy. It will not read new info again until I reboot. Windows2000 Pro.

Any ideas?

dougd@buckeye-express.com

 

[bcastner]

zaarnc,

You have a hardware problem. One of the signal lines in the ribbon cable for the floppy drive tells the system when there has been a disk change. Apparently the system isn't getting this signal.

Look inside the case. Check if any header pins on the motherboard or on the floppy drive are bent. Check for damage to the ribbon cable. See if you have a really old floppy drive that has a jumper on it for enabling/disabling the change disk signal line.

As a double check, boot using a DOS floppy and then check if sliding in another floppy still has DIR report the contents of the first floppy. Go to

http://www.bootdisk.com

for bootable floppy images you can write onto a floppy.

 

[AckNack]

zaarenoc: bcastner is "on the money" with this one.
Usually a new floppy cable fixes it; though it could be the drive or even the interface on the motherboard. I forget which pin it is.

Try different *good* cable first.

AckNack

http://www.diypctech.com

 

[myckael]

I have a nice 'chewy' problem .... I have a floppy drive (Panasonic) that can boot from switch on, but, although windows 2000 pro tells me that it has loaded the drivers, it cannot be reched so that I can place needed drivers for another computer. I have checked the connector, taken the drive out and re-plugged it back, checked security in Win 2k administrator tools, unloaded the drivers and reloaded them again, removed the drive from Device Manager and reloaded. My question is, why does this stupid floppy work with a boot-disk but not in windows?

 

[bcastner]

myckael,

It may be an upper/lower filter issue. The following contains links to the appropriate MS KB articles:

http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-6142-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=28709&messageID=325488

 

[NcCorduan]

We've been fighting this problem for a really long time in the computer labs at our school and we finally found out what the problem is. I don't have the documentation from MS handy but I'll try to find it again.

Here's the answer, and it's proven out pretty consistently, though unfortunately it doesn't help in the midst of the problem:

-- Many pre-formatted disks are missing a portion of data that Windows XP sometimes needs to read the disk properly. It's a flaw in the pre-format. We've instructed all our users to format their disks when they get them, no matter what the box says, and that has all but eliminated our floppy disk problems. Even users with old disks have been able to help themselves by reformatting their disks.