Help with floppy drive!

Hey guys, I have an older gateway E-1200 series running windows 98. Everytime I put a disk in the drive and try to get to some of the files on it it says I need to format the disk like it doesn't accept the disk and wants to erase everything.

Would this happen if the disk for formatted before in a NFTS machine or does that not matter and the drive might not be able to read any disk? I will find another win98 with fat32 and format a new disk and put some stuff on it and see what happens when i put it in the gateway.

Thanks guys!

I am pretty sure Win98 doesn't recognize anything written on NTFS formatted disks

I had a similar problem trying to read a USB HDD formatted NTFS from win98. I could see the drive in windows, but I couldn't transfer anything to/from it.

Or the drive is dead, unplugged, or it's cable is plugged in upside-down.

I think that if the cable is plugged upside down you will get the "disk not found" error, right? I mean you won't be asked to format or anything...
You are right about a possible faulty drive though...

ok, i'm gonna go format a disk on a fat32 system and put some files on it and then see if the computer can recognize that disk.

thanks guys

All floppies are formatted with the FAT12 system AFAIK. What your hard drive is formatted as has no bearing on the floppy's format.

If you ask me, it sounds like the read/write head of the floppy is dirty. You can either go out and buy a new drive, buy a cleaning kit, or clean the heads yourself with a q-tip and some alcohol.

JigPu

Cornel said:

I think that if the cable is plugged upside down you will get the "disk not found" error, right? I mean you won't be asked to format or anything...
You are right about a possible faulty drive though...

Click to expand...

In win98SE you get the "would you like to format the disk" error even when you don't have a floppy drive plugged in

JigPu said:

All floppies are formatted with the FAT12 system AFAIK. What your hard drive is formatted as has no bearing on the floppy's format.

If you ask me, it sounds like the read/write head of the floppy is dirty. You can either go out and buy a new drive, buy a cleaning kit, or clean the heads yourself with a q-tip and some alcohol.

JigPu

Click to expand...

What he said.

I work in a shop with about 300 Gateway machines. We don't have the 1200 but we do have every other modle. What I can tell you is this. There seems to be an issue with head alignment. Floppies keep track of the drive heads by mechanical means. This is different than hard drives which use electronic means.

Some of the machines that we have seem to have a slightly different allignment than other machines. As close as we (as a work group) can figure, there are two groups. All of the floppy drives work within thier group. A disk that is formatted in group 'A' works with all similar machines. Same with the 'B' group. There is no rhime or reason to determine one from another by simply looking at the disk or machine. It aint' right but that's how it is. To get a disk from the 'A' group to work in the 'B' group, you have to reformat.

There's no way to format a floppy in to NTFS, it's always just your standard FAT. I know JigPu said it already, but I like to ride on coattails.