Floppy formatted. Floppy not formatted!

G

Guest

Check this out, maybe someone here can tell me what's
going on.
Two computers -
*First computer: Windows 98 OS, 1 Floppy disk just
formatted on this computer, copied a file to floppy.
*Second computer - Windows XP Pro OS, inserted Floppy
from first computer, result = says "It's not formatted".
Why? Does this have something to do with FAT32 vs. NTFS?
Is there a way to use a floppy between the two computers?
 
R

RJK

Ruling out a dead floppy drive, and an incorrect floppy drive setting in
bios, and the remote chance that you're using a 1.44mb floppy disk in a very
old 720kb floppy drive - that would not recognize a 1.44mb floppy disk:-

It could be simply that the heads need cleaning in one or both drives, OR
one drive is misaligned. (...even a remote chance that both drives are
misaligned but, unlikely.)

If one drive is slightly out of hardware alignement, it'll probably read
that it wrote okay but when you put such a floppy in a drive with correct
alignment, it won't !

regards, Richard
 
P

purplehaz

I just ran into this, like an hour ago. It basicly happens cause old floppy
drives do not write the boot descripters correctly for xp to read. Meaning
the format of the floppy doesn't correctly tell xp that it is a floppy disk,
thus xp doesn't know what to do with it. There are basicly only two fixes.
1 - format the disk in xp, then bring it to the win98 machine, copy the
files and bring it back to xp
2 - buy a new a drive for the old win98 computer. The two new a drives will
talk fine.
 
L

Lem

Check this out, maybe someone here can tell me what's
going on.
Two computers -
*First computer: Windows 98 OS, 1 Floppy disk just
formatted on this computer, copied a file to floppy.
*Second computer - Windows XP Pro OS, inserted Floppy
from first computer, result = says "It's not formatted".
Why? Does this have something to do with FAT32 vs. NTFS?
Is there a way to use a floppy between the two computers?

Are you sure you didn't post this same question a couple of hours ago?

If you are trying to read floppies created on an older PC running Win9x,

this is probably XP's "feature" of only supporting the1.44MB floppy disk

format -- and therefore not being able to read floppies (even 1.44 MB
floppies) that were written on a drive capable of multiple density
floppies (like most of the older floppy drives can). Read all about it
(including a fix): http://tinyurl.com/li4a

On the other hand, floppy drives do fail and are dirt cheap (and easy)
to replace. If in doubt Google for a good hardware diagnostic
shareware/trialware.
 

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