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Cannot access floppy drive

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7 replies

by rirwin69

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
I am running W2K and on one machine the floppy drive reads a disk. I move it to another machine and it won't read it. I try a different disk and it reads it.

7 replies

by theburbs

Your problem needs a little more background in order to be answered:

* Are both machines Win2k/WIndows?
* Is the floppy fomatted as FAT?
* I assume the files on the floppy are of a
of a format recognized on both systems?
* Is the information on the floppy within a
folder that has rights set to it?

by rirwin69

Both machines are W2K. Floppy is FAT formatted. Files on the floppy are a recognized format by both machines. The machine that has problems reading the disk will read other disks. The disk does not have any rights set and can be read by the other machines.

by john.m1

not so much an answer more an additional comment.

We have a 55 pc Lan all running win2k / office xp
every now and then someone brings me a floppy disk that is no longer readable (dialogue says it needs formatting) sometimes i can lift data with "forensic" type software often not.

there is no pattern i.e. no floppy drives show signs of failure they all continue to read/write but several have shown this occasional problem.

the computers and floppy drives are of various make and age so no pattern there either. sure is curious, we are a training organisation, student need to save to floppy. i will keep watching for a solution. thanks John.M1

by pctech

I would suspect the read/write head alignment is slightly out of adjustment on one of the floppy drives. The alignment may not be far enough out to effect the reading of disks from other computers, just from the drive that wrote the data to the disk. The variance of head alignment between the two drives may be just enough to cause this problem. Should you know which drive was used to write the data, try writing to a few more disks to test this out on the drive that would not read the disk.

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