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Floppy disk mystery...

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by chainsawz

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I hope someone else has experienced this, and discovered a solution! I have an Excel 97 file on a floppy disk, and have opened it on many different pc's - some Win98, Win95, and WinNt?.no problems. Then I opened the file on a machine loaded with XP and saved back to the disk, and now the other machines do not even recognize the floppy. They can read other floppies fine, and if I put the problem floppy back in the XP machine, it can read it. All of these machines are loaded with the same Office 97 disk, so I'm not sure what the problem is. I have checked all the hardware, and found no problems. Also, the floppy is NOT set to read only, so any pc should be able to open it.

I have had this happen on other occasions (not just with XP). It seems that sometimes files opened and saved on a floppy by a particular pc, can only be accessed by that machine in the future. Is there any way to solve this??

Thanks!

7 replies

by lizzy

On the XP PC, open the Excel file and then choose Edit, Save As and check the default version it's saving the spreadsheet as. Is it the same Excel 97 or some other type of spreadsheet? You can change the default save type in Tools, Options and go to the save tab. It could be something else, but this is easy enough to try. Best wishes.

by chainsawz

The XP PC is loaded from the same Office 97 disk as the other computers. When I do 'file', 'save as', the file is saved as the correct version of Excel. The problem seems to be that nothing can be read from the floppy (even other files from other applications) unless it opened on the originating machine.

by 1stladytech

It could be a physical difference with the floppy drive not the disk. Some of the drives are out of tolerance on the head alignment but they work fine otherwise. This allows you to save files, but other drives cannot read the disks, as the data tracks are out of bounds. Try to change the fdd in the XP machine and see if it changes the symptoms. Good luck,

Vickie

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