Interesting FDD issue

[Gig-O-Ram]

I know...who cares about the FDD? I really don't use mine very much, but I needed to make a bootable disk for a memory test utility. So I go through a small stack of some floppys that I have lying around, and most of them won't read in my drive. I found a few that will, but most won't. I get an error message that says the disk is not formatted, and would I like to format? I tried the Format option on a disk, and after a minute or so, it said Windows could not complete the format.

My wife had some, and she said they worked fine. But when I put them in my drive, they won't read. She tries the same disk in her system, and it reads fine no problem. We tried several like that - a disk reads on her machine, but not on mine. We came across some that will read as a blank disk on my system, but I'm just racking my mind trying to figure why some will read on mine and some won't, but they all read on hers.

[oldman_gamer]

I went thru the same crapola.Some read some dont,some think they do some wish they did. All of this on a new build . I put a good floppy in and the PC says DUH, whats that? Sometimes they read...sometimes they dont. It sux.

[Panda Man]

Long story short, it sounds like the drive went bad on you.

[Gig-O-Ram]

Originally Posted by Panda Man

Long story short, it sounds like the drive went bad on you.

That's what I was thinking, considering it works intermitantly at best. It's kind of funny that the ones with the see-thru enclosures work, and the ones that look more standard don't - even thought that likely has nothing to do with it. I just hope the bootable that I made will work.

[Lead Head]

For some reason or another, the newest versions of windows (XP+) seem to really suck with floppy drives, at least for me. About a year ago, I was trying to flash my x800pro to 16 pipes with a floppy disk, after trying about 5 different floppy drives, and a million different disks, windows reported formatting issues on all of them (even though the disks worked fine in windows 98!), and I gave up and used a CD :-/

[Gig-O-Ram]

Well the bootable I made worked, and I was able to run that memory diagnostic. My RAM appears to be fine - but that's another issue.

What you said about the drives and XP makes more sense to me now, considering I've always had these types of problems since I've run XP.

[screwballl]

Ever since I have had XP, I have not installed a floppy drive in my systems, I always boot from CD or if the system allows, a thumb drive.

If there is a bit older system that needs a BIOS update then I have a floppy drive and a few good disks that I have not had any problem with in any OS (except haven't tried them in Vista and likely won't as bad as that screws things up).