Floppy drive problems

[JayE]

Hi,

I have a Samsun VM7000 Series laptop and the floppy drive is no longer working correctly, but I can't work out what the problem is.

The A drive is visible in Windows, but whatever disk I put in, it says that the disk is not formatted, when I know it is and has data on it.

I thought I'd test it in DOS by using the Windows ME CD to boot up into DOS, but it shows the A drive whether or not I have a disk in there - I don't understand what's going on!!

Any ideas what the problem is?

Regards,
Jay/UK

 

[Snickle]

WindowsME doesn't have much DOS in it. You might try a disk cleaning kit from WalMart or KMart and run it in the floppy.

 

[LadyH]

Sounds like a bad drive to me...or maybe a stuck floppy slide. If there is a slide stuck, remove it and see if the drive works. if it still doesn't work, then my thought is a bad drive. If it is under warranty contact the company, if not, you'll have to find someone that works on them.

One thing, if it does this on only one disk, but reads others, then I'd look at the disk as the problem.

pcheather@yahoo.com

 

[blazblaz]

I had a same problem with a of Lap Top purchased 3 years ago. Tried to fix it with some repair shop, but they just coudl not do it. The problem is that for some reason the reading head in floppy was missaligned, and even the floppy was formatted normally on the other computer, my lap top did not recognized it. The only thing they recomended to replace the whole floppy drive. Unfortunatelly I could not even find that type of the floppy drive on the market. After a lot of headache I decided to purchase an external floppy drive connected through USB. It cost you 65 US $. At least I could still use the Lap Top, downloading some files.

 

[JayE]

Hi,

I did have a floppy disk stuck inside the drive. But my local PC shop managed to remove it for me in a matter of seconds.

I'm sure I've seen this problem before on certain disks, but this is on EVERY disk I put in there. And the behaviour at the DOS prompt is very weird - to me. I would expect if there wasn't a disk inside it would say "error reading drive A - ......? and give me the choice of what to do, the fact that it shows some files seems weird, what is it doing?

I may replace the laptop - not under warranty (secondhand), low on memory (only 64MB) and battery unit gets very hot and does not hold it's charge properly. Now I can't use the floppy drive - not brilliant when you look at this all together !!!

I know I can buy an external floppy drive, but not sure if it will be usable outside of Windows ie as boot disk loader. And at £60, not a cheap option !

Is it worth trying a floppy drive cleaner?

Regards,
Jay/UK

 

[MangoJones]

The a: drive in dos you refer to, is actually likley to be the ram drive or cd drive, because the floppy is not registering to the system - the DOS is assigning the "now available" a: letter to one of these drives. Its perfectly normal behaviour