(A) drive will not read floppies

[Darrell Gadson]

keep having problems attempting access the A drive:
getting error messages of please reformat or there is no
disc in floppy drive (A)

 

[chris.catt]

Hi, could be the drive itself, as they are cheap to purchase I'd try a new
one.....
Chris C

 

[Rich]

This is really old school, so be warned.

Push open the floppy drive door with your finger, off to
one side. Blow hard and DRY into the floppy drive once or
twice.
Try your floppy disk again.

If this does not work, or if you spit into your drive,
well floppy drives are pretty cheap (and inexpensive,
too!) and go get another one.

P.S. This has kept many floppy drive working for me over
the years.

 

[Lem]

keep having problems attempting access the A drive:
getting error messages of please reformat or there is no
disc in floppy drive (A)

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.