A friend of mine has a few image files on a floppy disc (how archaic!) and I said that I would put them on a CD (what a waste of space). Anyway, the floppy is recoginzed on their computer (WinXP), but not mine. I have two computers and both say "Please insert a disk into the drive A:". I don't know why, but often when I try to use my floppy drives (which ISN'T very often), they are not recognized. I don't want to just throw money at the problem. Is this an XP phenomenon? Anybody have ideas other than buying new drives for my computers?

Thanks.

Hey are you sure the images are not of the mac format? Could be why your PC does not wqant to read the disk...

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Anyway, the floppy is recoginzed on their computer (WinXP), but not mine. I have two computers and both say "Please insert a disk into the drive A:".

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Well, I've never seen it happen, but I've heard that (supposedly), the read/write heads in a floppy drive can become misaligned, causing the drive to write to disks incorrectly: therefore only it can read them.

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I don't know why, but often when I try to use my floppy drives (which ISN'T very often), they are not recognized. I don't want to just throw money at the problem. Is this an XP phenomenon? Anybody have ideas other than buying new drives for my computers?

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Well, that's odd. Are these home-built systems?

Are you sure you are trying good disks?

Here's something to try: put a (known virus-free) disk in the drive, and reboot. If the floppy drive is working, and your BIOS boot order is sane, then you should receive an "invalid system disk" error. At least that will tell you the motherboard can see there is a disk in the drive.

:)

~psi42

One thing I have been told about floppy disks is that you should never save to them. In stead, apparently, you should save the file to the hard drive and copy it to the disk. I have NO idea how this helps but apparently it does. I would recommend using a usb thumb stick over floppy disks any day for obvious reasons.