We windows XP here at my work (college). I have people from a jobs class using a floppy to save their resume on. Why is it that they are able to save the resume to the floppy, but if they try to bring the resume back up after closing it that sometimes, the floppy says "disk needs formatting". Why do some disks work and some do not?

The quality control used on the disc and drivers if fairly lacking.
Also the fact that they are no longer manufactured or supported as people have moved to flash storage.

So all in all, dump the floppies and move with the times.

It may bee the floppy drive and not the disk. Try cleaning the heads there are head cleaners that look like floppy disk. The floppy is the worst way to save documents try to encourage using a USB flash drive the small ones are quite inexpensive in the $5 range and can be read by more computers I have not had a floppy drive on my last 3 computers.

Floppy disks have a tendency to get bad sectors and when you write to the disk it doesn't warn you that some data was not written. If that data happens to be at the very beginning of the disk then it asks to format the disk cause it sees nothing. There are programs that claim to recover bad sectors on a floppy but they are hit and miss. Also, floppies are dependent on a first sector read. That means if the heads on one drive are even slightly aligned differently that another, the disk will only be read from the drive it was created (formatted) on. Floppy disks are a horrible storage medium since they are subject to many failures from magnetic exposure to static and scratches. I still use floppies on all my machines since I like to run floppy boot disks for different reasons like loading sata drivers in an XP OS installation or some cool utilities like memtest86 or some older partitioning tools. Not all older PC's can boot from usb. But since your not booting when saving a resume, a usb drive or a free online storage site would be more appropriate. Many e-mail sites also allow you a certain amount of uploading storage space, and you can access them from any other PC.