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Cannot access 3.5 inch disk drive A

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8 replies

by ngubaness

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When I try to access Drive A (3.5" disk drive), I get the message saying that the drive is not ready and I must contact my Administrator. The problem is that this drive was working fine all along, suddenly I get this message. What could possibly be the reason for this message and do I go about solving this problem.

8 replies

by otl

Check the bios setup and verify that the A: floppy is supported and the boot sequence is usually A: then C:

Once in windows goto the control panel and open the system folder and goto the device manager tab, ensure the floppy shows up under disk drives and floppy drives and there are no ? or ! infront of the entry (delete these). If not it can easily be added using the hardware wizard. You may even want to delete these entries and see if windows "finds" the floppy and reinstalls the software,the software may have been corrupted.

Is the drive trying to be accessed by the system? (the light for the drive lighting up) If not you may have a loose cable inside the computer. Open the case and verify all cables are completely plugged into the back of the floppy drive. If they are verify the ribbon cable is well seated on the mother board.

If all these fail, replace the drive, a power surge may have killed it.

Good Luck!

by tmaclennan

Sounds like someone has enacted policies on you to disable the A: drive....I do it all the time on manufacturing area machines. Multiple reasons for it...keeps sneakernet viruses out, prevents unauthorized software loading, makes data theft harder..... I would suggest contacting your Administrator. If, however, you are the Administrator, I would suggest doing a search on "policy editor" here in TR and reading up on it.

by mphoffar

Wait a sec..I'm reading this two different ways...

Is there a message that pops up on it's own while your working like something is trying to access the floppy drive. Best bet there is either findfast is kicking in and trying to index what's on your drive or there's a virus on your system doing the samething

or is it, you popped in a disk, tried to read it and got that. In which case I'd wonder if the disk is still good, has the drive been locked down with a policy or did the drive justgo bad on you (and that does happen). Try another disk and see if you can format it, if it does, then it's the disk. If it doesn't then it's one of the other two.

Good luck to you

Mark

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