5.25 drive with XP

[Guest]

Have previously postd this problem in the hardware section, but not resolved.
Hopefully there is someone browsing the general cateory who may be able to
help.

I am trying to install a 5 1/4 360K floppy drive. The bios is set up for
this drive. The drive is recognised, but cannot be accessed. I get the
following error message:
"Request could not be performed because on an I/O device error".
Same message with 3 different drives.
All 3 drives tested and all work on a machine running W95, but will not work
on either of two machines running XP (A P4 2.6 and an Athalon 300).
Cables swapped and tested OK.



that all work fine on a machine running
W95. I have swaped the cables, and they test fine also.

 

[David H. Lipman]

You know I had a tire for a Model T Ford. It worked great on the Model T.

How come it won't work on my Ford Explorer ?

Sound familiar ?

Support for the 5 1/4" floppy drive was dropped long ago.

Basically the advice is -- Give up the idea !

Dave




| Have previously postd this problem in the hardware section, but not resolved.
| Hopefully there is someone browsing the general cateory who may be able to
| help.
|
| I am trying to install a 5 1/4 360K floppy drive. The bios is set up for
| this drive. The drive is recognised, but cannot be accessed. I get the
| following error message:
| "Request could not be performed because on an I/O device error".
| Same message with 3 different drives.
| All 3 drives tested and all work on a machine running W95, but will not work
| on either of two machines running XP (A P4 2.6 and an Athalon 300).
| Cables swapped and tested OK.
|
|
|
| that all work fine on a machine running
| W95. I have swaped the cables, and they test fine also.
|

 

[Bob Knowlden]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309623&Product=winxp

"Floppy Disk Formats That Are Supported in Windows XP"

It lists read/write for 5 1/4" 360 kB disks, but no formatting. There's no
mention of 8" floppies at all. ;-)

In other words, if your mainboard supports a 5 1/4" floppy, then XP ought to
offer limited support for the drive. I've never tried it myself.

A quick look at Google Groups suggests that the drive ought to work, with
the restrictions as above. I saw a suggestion that the diskettes could be
formatted using a command-line utility.

Good luck.

Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

 

[Jeff]

Hi,

I didn`t know those still existed, even more surprise to
see that the 5 1/4 floppies still work after all these
years.

Jeff

 

[Don Taylor]

Have previously postd this problem in the hardware section, but not resolved.
Hopefully there is someone browsing the general cateory who may be able to
help.

I am trying to install a 5 1/4 360K floppy drive. The bios is set up for
this drive. The drive is recognised, but cannot be accessed. I get the
following error message:
"Request could not be performed because on an I/O device error".
Same message with 3 different drives.
All 3 drives tested and all work on a machine running W95, but will not work
on either of two machines running XP (A P4 2.6 and an Athalon 300).
Cables swapped and tested OK.

I don't know whether this will help you or not, it worked for me.
I was asked to salvage some data from some 5 1/4 360k floppies.
I grabbed a drive, installed it, set the bios to 360k, booted the
machine, slipped in a disk and got errors. I began to believe
that the drive or disks might be bad enough that I couldn't get
the data.

As a desperate last measure I set the bios to 1.2 meg and tried
again. THEN it could read the 360k floppies. My guess at this
point was that the drive might have been auto-sensing the density
but when the bios was set to 360k something was failing in the
communication, but that's only a guess.

I managed to suck all their data off the disks and told them it
was likely nobody would ever be able to do that for them again.

If this trick works for you then please let me know
thanks

 

[Plato]

I am trying to install a 5 1/4 360K floppy drive. The bios is set up for

Install it on a non-XP PC.

 

[Plato]

I didn`t know those still existed, even more surprise to
see that the 5 1/4 floppies still work after all these
years.

An insurace client of mine uses them in his business. He sells 5 million
dollars worth of policies/year. Using 286s and 5 1/4s and those small
green text monitors. When a drive goes bad I get $125 just for the part.

 

[techguru100]

This may be a long shot, but I suggest using an high-
density (1.2M) drive instead.

 

[Jim Macklin]

see
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309623


message | This may be a long shot, but I suggest using an high-
| density (1.2M) drive instead.
| >-----Original Message-----
| >Have previously postd this problem in the hardware
| section, but not resolved.
| >Hopefully there is someone browsing the general cateory
| who may be able to
| >help.
| >
| >I am trying to install a 5 1/4 360K floppy drive. The
| bios is set up for
| >this drive. The drive is recognised, but cannot be
| accessed. I get the
| >following error message:
| >"Request could not be performed because on an I/O device
| error".
| >Same message with 3 different drives.
| >All 3 drives tested and all work on a machine running
| W95, but will not work
| >on either of two machines running XP (A P4 2.6 and an
| Athalon 300).
| >Cables swapped and tested OK.
| >
| >
| >
| > that all work fine on a machine running
| >W95. I have swaped the cables, and they test fine also.
| >
| >.
| >

 

[Guest]

Thanks to those with helpful suggestions. Don's tip of setting the BIOS to
1.2 worked.

To those whose posts (particularly in the hardware group) were designed to
show scarcasm rather than assistance, may I hope you live long enough to
realise that sometimes there is value in knowledge stored in the past (even
if it is on obselete media).

I have a great stack of old 5.25 disks, that were not supposed to last this
long: all I have tested so far read OK. Good storage works!!