drive : A

I have had this problem when trying to use a floppy that had been formatted in a computer running 98 in an XP running NTFS. The Windows 98 could read the floppy whether it had been formatted in either computer but the Windows XP sp2 computer could only read it if it had been formatted in an XP machine. So in my case none of the floppy drives are bad. I hope this helps.

I think that the qulaity of floppies has dropped over the years. I see more and more floppies failing in one machine to another. Whether you need another drive? Do other floppies work well in the drive, buy a new one and try it, my suggestions it may be time to give up the floppy.

As a techie who grew up using a floppy to boot a machine (no bootable CD ROM's, or OS's on diekettes) it may be hard, but there are very good viable options.

i believe it is the quality of floppies going down. All your major manufacuters are phasing floppy drives out, and making you add them for cost. If i were you I would get some flash thumb drives. I have seen them around $20 for 128 up to 256 MB; which is like having 128 or 256 floppies in your pocket, also from personal expierence they handle the washer and dryer well...lol. Mainly the only reason you might need a floppy drive in this day and age is for raid drivers.

I have seen this problem many times. It could be what the others have posted for you or it could be that the read/write heads are not accessing the floppy correctly. I have seen where the disk drive was broken.

Does the floppy work in a different computer? If so, what is the difference between the two computers? If not, try reformatting it. Sometimes they get mislabeled as formatted when they really are not.

Boot to a dos prompt. Press F8 while booting till a menu comes up.

Insert a floppy and at the c: prompt type format a:

Answer yes and wait till it finishes. If it does you probably have a good drive.

To be sure.

Take the floppy to a second computer and copy some files on the floppy. If you can do this the format is good.

Now back at the first computer, while still in dos and with the floppy in the drive type dir and press enter.

It should list the files and their size.

If it doesn't then you probably have a bad drive.

If it does reboot and try to read the disk in windows.

There are some virus that affects the floppy drives.

Lee