Floppy drive keeps asking to reformat disk

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rich
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Rich

I have several Compaq's that get a message to reformat a
floppy disk after they are inserted. The disk has been
formated and has data, but it still asks to reformat.
Running XP. Is this a driver problem, or??
 
Hallo Rich,

I have several Compaq's that get a message to reformat a
floppy disk after they are inserted. The disk has been
formated and has data, but it still asks to reformat.
Running XP. Is this a driver problem, or??
Click to expand...

Probably a broken disk drive. Do you get this with all floppy disks?
 
I don't get this with all floppy disks, intermittent, but
I do get the message on several different computers.
 
Hallo Rich,

I don't get this with all floppy disks, intermittent, but
I do get the message on several different computers.
Click to expand...

That's really strange. To the best of my knowledge Compaq never used
"enhanced" floppy disk drives. Did you check the cables? Try to use
the vacuum cleaner on the floppy disk dive (just hold open the drive's
door and press the vacuum cleaner to the disk drive.
 
Rich said:
I don't get this with all floppy disks, intermittent, but
I do get the message on several different computers.
Click to expand...

XP simply has problems with older floppies, which is all most of us have
any more. If a floppy was formatted in Win9x originally, those are the
most troublesome, probably from simple deterioration of the medium.

Q
 
My personal experience was, I installed XP and had the same problem as you.
I tried every suggestion I could find, including changing floppy drives 3 or
4 times. Nothing helped. I have come to the conclusion that some XP disks
have faulty floppy drivers, as, some people have no problem with floppies
and others do. I have found information that this problem is recognized and
is supposed to be addressed in SP2.

I was able to resolve the problem on my machine by installing the 3-mode
driver that you can find from the following link. The article is rather
wordy and the instructions are difficult to follow but, it worked for me.
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]&rnum=1

HTH, JAX
 
On my machine, changing the floppy cable solved the problem.

JAX said:
My personal experience was, I installed XP and had the same problem as you.
I tried every suggestion I could find, including changing floppy drives 3 or
4 times. Nothing helped. I have come to the conclusion that some XP disks
have faulty floppy drivers, as, some people have no problem with floppies
and others do. I have found information that this problem is recognized and
is supposed to be addressed in SP2.

I was able to resolve the problem on my machine by installing the 3-mode
driver that you can find from the following link. The article is rather
wordy and the instructions are difficult to follow but, it worked for me.
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]&rnum=1

HTH, JAX
Click to expand...
 
JAX..
I have found another pointer to this problem. Unless compress old
files is disabled in W2K and WXP, windows will compress the file
sfloppy.sys. I have not bothered to further research this because I
have never had this problem. Of course I have not compressed any
files since I upgraded from a 20MB drive to a 40MB HDD.

JAX said:
My personal experience was, I installed XP and had the same problem as you.
I tried every suggestion I could find, including changing floppy drives 3 or
4 times. Nothing helped. I have come to the conclusion that some XP disks
have faulty floppy drivers, as, some people have no problem with floppies
and others do. I have found information that this problem is recognized and
is supposed to be addressed in SP2.

I was able to resolve the problem on my machine by installing the 3-mode
driver that you can find from the following link. The article is rather
wordy and the instructions are difficult to follow but, it worked for me.
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]&rnum=1

HTH, JAX
Click to expand...
 
Quaoar said:
XP simply has problems with older floppies, which is all most of us have
any more. If a floppy was formatted in Win9x originally, those are the
most troublesome, probably from simple deterioration of the medium.
Click to expand...

This is not entirely true. I have some very old copies of MSDOS 6.22
and XPPro reads them just fine.
 
If you have a PC available which will read it, then copy it to a different
floppy.
Then see if the XP machine will read the newly copied data????

For general info, I have had some floppys simply go bad in that they would
be
readable on one PC but not on another.
 
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