Missing floppy drive letters

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

I have installed a Catweasel Mk4 floppy disk controller to run my two floppy
disk drives under Windows XP SP2. The installation resulted in ten virtual
floppy disks (five different formats available for each of the two drives) in
the registry. These virtual floppy disks are shown under the Device Manager
as operating properly, but they do not appear under Disk Manager, My
Computer, or Explorer -- and they are inacessible to Windows applications.

How can I assign drive letters to these floppy drives so they may be used
directly by Windows?
 
Dear MadDog...

I did talk with the CatWeasel folks. Their reply was that, "drivers do
not assign drive letters." They seem to believe that the issue lies in
Windows XP.

Microsoft, on the other hand, say that I am not eligible for their help:
my windows XP is bulk licensed through a third party.

The third party hasn't a clue.

So, here I am. Hope that some of you out there can help.

Thanks.
 
You said that "I have installed Catweasel Mk4 floppy disk controller". Have
you installed them manually. Are you using External Floppy Disk Drives? If
not, then you don't have to install any controller for FDD atleast. "Standard
Floppy Disk Contoller" is the best one. Installing incorrect FDD contoller
can also cause to show you 10 different virtual drives.

Have you checked your BIOS settings? If not, then check the Standard
settings and make sure Floppy Drive is not set to None or Disabled. One more
thing, download TWEAK UI from Microsoft.com and check the Hide Drive
settings. Your drive could be hidden only and may be it is working fine. To
check this out: Insert a Floppy Disk and goto to Command Prompt and type DIR
A: and press Enter. See if you can see something.

Hope this information helps you, let us know!
 
Garth Fitzgerald said:
Dear MadDog...

I did talk with the CatWeasel folks. Their reply was that, "drivers do
not assign drive letters." They seem to believe that the issue lies in
Windows XP.

Microsoft, on the other hand, say that I am not eligible for their help:
my windows XP is bulk licensed through a third party.

The third party hasn't a clue.

So, here I am. Hope that some of you out there can help.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

From what I know, Catweasal reads non-IBM floppies (e.g. Amiga floppies)
Have you tried inserting & reading/writing files? Maybe the Catweasal device
only uses the one letter and changes the drive type in Windows accordingly.
(e.g. You can insert many different CDs/DVDs in the same drive, and Windows
automatically changes depending on the type)
 
Thank you all for your help. We have not yet found a solution to the
problem. To answer your questions in order:

RajKohli,

I installed the disk controller manually from the vendors CD.
I am using two internal drives.
The Catweasel MK4 is a PCI floppy controller card. My BIOS is set to
disable the motherboard controller to avoid conflicts.
TweakUI shows all drives as visible.
Command prompt DIR A: returns "The system cannot find the path
specified.
Command prompt A: returns "Invalid drive specification."

Evils Dark

Glad you have heard of the Catweasel! The MK4 is advertised as being
able
to read PC 1.44MB format disks as well as Amiga, Commodore, and
others.
Windows recognizes the Catweasel and its attached disks in Device
Manager
but not in Explorer, so I cannot read/writh through Windows. I have
tried an
"image tool" that is distributed with the Catweasel. It does seem
to copy a
PC 1.44MB floppy to hard disk, but I cannot read the file because I
do not
know its format. In any case, I am more interested in Windows
applications
being able to read the disks than in dumping them onto my hard disk.

Thank you both for you kindness in replying. Hope that we can find some way
of having Windows XP recognize these drivers as floppy disks with letters.

Thanks.
 
That may be true, but the Catweasel folks should know what to check in
Windows XP if their product doesn't work correctly. Did you go into disk
management and see if you can assign drive letters there ??

MD
 
Mad Dog,

I did go into disk management, but the floppy drives are invisible
there. I cannot use disk management to assign drive letters to them. They
only appear under the device management.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.
 
Back
Top