I cant use my floppy drive with win XP.

[gingo]

When I insert a floppy disk into my FDD and go into the A: drive it says it cant read the disk and needs to format it, so I click "format" and it gives me a warning message that all the data will be lost and I click "OK" and I hear my floppy drive doing something but then it pops up a message that says "windows was unable to complete the format".

I've tried several different disks and no luck.

What do I do?

 

[repo man11]

Have you tried it with a brand new disk? Can it read from a disk that you allready have? Normally I'd just think it was a bad disk, but in this case it might be the drive that is going.

 

[gingo]

I've tried new disks and disks with stuff on them.

 

[DDR-PIII]

i had that problem too

 

[repo man11]

I'd double check your BIOS settings, amke sure it shows a 1.44 drive, and that your FDD controller is enabled. Other than trying another floppy, I'm out of ideas. Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[zachj]

if the light is constantly on, your cable is on upside down. Try reversing it for the hell of it, though, as you never know what will happen. It won't hurt it if it's on backwards, it just won't work.

Z

 

[gingo]

Its Win XP thats the problem. Ever since I upgraded to Win XP I've had these stupid problems. I'm sure its not my hardware. I'll double check some settings.

 

[baqai]

i have heard that Windows XP works weird with floopies, if you didn't had floopy enabled in your BIOS when you were installaing XP than for sure you are going to have problems using it after you install XP

At times it doesn't even detects a floopy if you enable it after installing XP

 

[zachj]

I use Home, but I've never had a problem that wasn't related to an upside down floppy cable. I guess it could be a lot of things, but floppies are so increadibly simple in this digital age that I think that whatever is wrong with it is almost certainly something really stupid.

Z

 

[ronin1967]

Unfortunately there are very few commands for floppy disk and very few controls. Assuming you went into BIOS and in STANDARD CMOS have selected Drive A: 1.44, 3.5 in, and Windows XP has installed their generic Floppy Disk Controller and Driver there isn't much else you can do. When you say upgraded to XP, is it a fresh install? Because if it's an upgrade that could be your problem, Windows offer the upgrade software, but it has been my experience that XP can be great as a new install and a huge headache otherwise...

 

[zachj]

'tis true.

Z