Floppy disc not working with XP

[Chuck57]

I recently had to reformat and reinstall XP and it seems that windows isn't reading my floppy discs. The drive, according to windows, is working properly. At least the little light comes on at startup and when I try to use it.

What I get is a warning saying that the disc is not formatted and would I like to format it. If I put in a blank disc and try to format it, it says it can't do the format.

I've tried Help, tried, troubleshooting, and searched some on the web, without much luck. I've heard this was sometimes a problem with XP. When I reformatted, I chose NTFS, which I thought might be the cause, but I read that NTFS is supposed to be okay with floppy discs.

The drive was working okay prior to my having to reformat. I know floppies are on the way out, but some of the places I deal with still require my work on floppy. Any help will sure be appreciated.

[Prince_Serendip]

:) Hi Chuck!

Your Floppy Driver program may have become corrupted. Try reinstalling it. Let us know how it goes?


Best regards from Larry

[bigc73542]

You can go to device manager and open the floppy device highlite the floppy drive and right click it and click remove. After it deletes it reboot your computer and it will automatically reinstall the floppy drivers. trust me it works. ;)

[Chuck57]

Okay, and thanks for the help. I uninstalled the floppy drive and reinstalled it. XP knows the drive is there, but still won't read the discs. I've done more searching and it seems this is an ongoing problem with some XP systems. Many have this problem and some don't, and Microsoft it seems isn't interested in fixing it since they believe the floppy disc is near death.

Short of reinstalling 98SE on my second, smaller, hard drive, and using it for my work, which I don't want to do and am not sure I can do, I'm at wits end. Both hard drives are NTFS formatted, so I don't know if I could install 98 if I wanted to. I've said it before and will say it again, my next computer will be an Apple.