Windows XP floppy drive problems

[tsurikov]

Hello all,

I'm hoping you can help me with a floppy drive issue. I have a PC system (P4 2.4GHz, Asus P4SBX-X MB, 512MB RAM, 40 GB HD) operating under Windows XP. Under Windows XP, the 3.5" floppy drive behaves strangely. That is:

1) It can read the contents of a diskette and show them in an Explorer window, but takes a long time (more than 1 minute) and keeps popping up "Drive not ready, abort/retry/ignore" messages in the process;

2) I can't copy anything onto the disk; again, "Drive not ready", blah blah blah;

3) It cannot format a disk. If you ask it to format a disk, it will go through all the motions, but at a ridiculously slow pace (about 20 minutes per disk), and report at the end "Windows cannot format this disk.".

I have swapped floppy drives, but this didn't change anything.

I have also tried the drive under Unix, booting the computer from Tom's Root Boot disk. Guess what - No problems! I can read, write, and format disks just fine! This, to my mind, eliminated the idea that it's a fried floppy disk controller (which I didn't want to believe anyway, as this is a brand-new system.) This leads me to believe that the problem may lie with Windows XP. But I have no idea where to go next - in all my years of IT experience, I've never had a problem like this with a floppy drive!

I'd appreciate any suggestions! Cheers!
--tsurikov

 

[jrbarnett]

Hi,

In the BIOS setup, is there a floppy drive read only flag set?
I think that Windows and Linux bypass this as they don't use BIOS calls for floppy access but I would check anyway.
It is often called "Floppy drive read only enable" or "disable floppy drive writes" or something similar.

John

 

[wmccall]

Have you checked ASUS web site to see if there is an updated driver for the floppy controller? Could be a compatiblity/driver issue.

 

[franklin97355]

Try the XP forum.