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Floppy detected but won't work

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by carol 4 views

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I was a bad girl and didn't have a surge protector on my computer and lightning fried my modem. I discovered on trying to install a new one that my floppy drive is never ready reading drive a: and it's puzzling to me because it is detected in the bios and in Win98 when I start up. The drive also lights up to try to read a disk. I tried a new ribbon with the drive and same problem. Then I also tried a new floppy drive. Now I have a new floppy drive and ribbon which are detected and seem to be working except they won't read a disk that I've been able to read on other computers. Any ideas?

8 replies

by ab2hu

A good possbility is that your motherboard may have also been hit. Rather than buy a brand new motherboard for this purpose, you can possibly try to (Depending if your floppy controller is onboard):
1. Go into the system BIOS and turn it off.
2. Buy a floppy disk controller card, sometimes it comes as the entire serial bus, parallel bus, etc...
3. Set the jumpers on the new card to ONLY controlling the floppy disk drive.
4. Insert it into the motherboard, and turn on the computer.
That should bypass the bad section of your motherboard that controls the floppy drive. If you have any questions you can email me at ab2hu@hotmail.com. Good luck!

by dmiles

First try Reinstalling the floppy disk driver and you can do this by going to system and adding it through device manager

by jackg3

Refer to Microsoft technet article #q131690 it goes through trouble shooting a floppy drive. You can also go to a safe command prompt and see if the floppy drive is working in dos mode, try reading and writing to a blank floppy. Or have you tried going into safe mode.

by tchieng

Before you go out and buy something... stick in a new floppy diskette and try to format it from DOS, not the DOS box under Window. If you can format it and read/write to it, then the alignment on your floppy drive is off or the floppy drive that originally formatted the diskette you can't read is off. If you can't format it, then it probably is the controller on the motherboard.

by carol

I was suprised to find it worked to boot up a startup disk even though it wouldn't work under a DOS shell. Then I formatted the disk that was not reading and now it reads that one and all the others I tried before in Windows. Pretty weird stuff. Wayto go Microsoft! Thanks! You made my week!

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