Floppy Drive Won't Recognize Disks

[soccastar001]

When I put a disk in a brand new floppy drive on my computer it and try
to open it it says "please insert floppy" even though there's one
already in there.

When I try to access the floppy from a command prompt it says "device
not ready". How do I fix this?

 

[RobertVA]

When I put a disk in a brand new floppy drive on my computer it and try
to open it it says "please insert floppy" even though there's one
already in there.

When I try to access the floppy from a command prompt it says "device
not ready". How do I fix this?

could be:

Misaligned heads in the floppy drive
Drive used to write data to floppy had misaligned heads
Bad connection on drive's data or power connector
Misconfiguration in CMOS settings
Hardware conflict with other peripherals

Try formating a floppy in the drive. If you can then read that floppy
it's likely a head alignment issue. Note that a drive with properly
aligned heads might not be able to read disks from a misaligned drive.

Otherwise someone would have to check the CMOS screens for proper
settings and check the cable connections inside the computer. There may
be some instances where a reversed ribbon cable could damage the drive's
interface circuitry.

 

[soccastar001]

It won't even recognize blank disks though and I've changed both power
and data connectors and still the same problem. I don't see any
BIOS/CMOS setting regarding this other than the one that labels drive A
as a 3.5 1.44MB floppy.

I can't format a floppy because it never recognizes it has one in there.

 

[Andy]

What you want to do is isolate the problem as either hardware or
software. To do this I always recommend booting the computer with a
DOS diskette. If it boots to DOS, the hardware works fine.

 

[Sunny]

What you want to do is isolate the problem as either hardware or
software. To do this I always recommend booting the computer with a
DOS diskette. If it boots to DOS, the hardware works fine.

Very sensible advice.

However, it won't isolate the problem. I've seen numerous cases where
the system repeatedly boots DOS just fine from floppy, but a fresh XP
install won't acknowledge the same diskette in the same drive.

I am a longtime user of an ancient DOS program called Disk Copy Fast. It
reads and writes floppy disk images much faster than DOS or any newer
operating system I've used, and it works in XP. I have a large
collection of useful bootable floppy images on my hard drive, and I use
DCF to make a boot floppy whenever I need one. XP often claims there is
no diskette in the drive immediately after successfully writing an image
using DCF - but if I reboot, the system always boots from the
non-existent floppy just fine. When I reboot into XP, the floppy is
usually (but not always) gone again.

In my experience XP only pretends to support floppy drives - sometimes
they work, more often not. It's much less frustrating to use a USB thumb
drive instead.

Sunny