can't make startup floppies

[AMD]

Vista tells me I need to close the write protect tab on my floppies in order
to make a dos startup disk. Why is it telling me this for every floppy I
have? They are closed so they are writable too. It says this though on every
floppy.

 

[Chad Harris]

Hi AMD--

Always fun to see people who still have a floppy drive. It would seem that
your discs are closed and could be written to from your description.

http://helpdesk.ua.edu/help/howto/writeprotect.html

"A disk is write-protected when the plastic tab at the top has been moved to
reveal a "hole" in the disk. When you look at the back of the disk with the
sliding metal part at the bottom (see below), the left hole is closed when
the disk can be written to. Sliding the tab up and down switches between
write-protected and not write-protected.

When a disk is write-protected, files can be read or copied from the disk
but nothing can be saved or copied onto it. This can help prevent you (or
anyone else) from accidentally deleting or saving over important files."



CH

 

[Chad Harris]

AMD--

I should have added with all the options to fix a startup problem, and
floppies often failing for this purpose, I'm not sure why you would need to
make them. There are a number of ways now that to me have much better odds
of working than any startup floppies with respect to the Vista OS and XP for
that matter like F8 options, Startup Repair, or a repair install.

CH

 

[AMD]

AMD--

I should have added with all the options to fix a startup problem, and
floppies often failing for this purpose, I'm not sure why you would need
to make them. There are a number of ways now that to me have much better
odds of working than any startup floppies with respect to the Vista OS and
XP for that matter like F8 options, Startup Repair, or a repair install.

CH

As I said the floppes are not write protected. The need is to flash a bios
on a motherboard on another pc.
But the floppy drive was bad as i thought. another drive was able to format,
but says it is not in a recognized format so vista can't read it and i need
it to copy the bios flash tools on it. man!

 

[AMD]

As I said the floppes are not write protected. The need is to flash a bios
on a motherboard on another pc.
But the floppy drive was bad as i thought. another drive was able to
format, but says it is not in a recognized format so vista can't read it
and i need it to copy the bios flash tools on it. man!

Things are cool now that the flopy is good with the flash tools. I copied
flash tools to floppy. It said it needs to be formatted. Then it popped up
the format window. Then I said dos startup disk. It did that and then
started the copy of the flash tools files. So that's cool.
Problem is the flash did not help at all on the motherboard, as I thought it
would not.

 

[Chad Harris]

AMD--

I see. I didn't realize what you meant was you wanted to flash the bios
with a bios update. Let us know what happens. I can't remember if I've
tried to format on floppy on Vista in view of jhafle's comment.

You should be able to format the floppy withthis or depending on the letter
of your Vista drive.

C:\>format a:

Good luck,

CH

 

[Administrator/jhafele]

Bring up the " command " window in Vista. Take a short course in basic DOS
........... Insert floppy in drive ....... Type -
format a: in " command " window and follow the simple instructions. Do not
use the GUI method in Vista as it does not work properly just as you found
out. man !

 

[Chad Harris]

jhafele--

The good old dos training has a ton of relevance, and gives you many more
options for getting things done, and will always have. I wish I had had
years of it. I am trying to remember if I tried to format a floppy using
Vista in one of the betas. I'm sure going to try now from the gui just to
see what happens, and then compare what happens from the cmd prompt.

Thanks.

CH

 

[Administrator/jhafele]

Chad -
I may be out of line when I stated that one can not format a floppy using
the GUI mode in Vista. However, I have experienced the same result as " AMD
" on several occasions with the exact same message although the floppy disc
and drive were O.K.
That good old DOS training still has a little use left in this ever
advancing tech world ! Regards, John.

 

[Val]

This brings up a question - does Vista support floppy drives any better than
XP does, which is to say, it doesn't very well.

See: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q309623


Vista tells me I need to close the write protect tab on my floppies in order
to make a dos startup disk. Why is it telling me this for every floppy I
have? They are closed so they are writable too. It says this though on every
floppy.