There is no incompatibility between a floppy created on one
Windows operating system and another. They all use FAT12 and
should work in exactly the same way.
There may be an incompatibility in the way the two diskette
*drives* are aligned, preventing reading of a diskette created on
the other drive.
A suggestion: Try the floppy on a 9x machine and see if it works. If it
does, format a floppy on your machine and then copy the files from the
floppy in question to the 9x machine and then transfer the file to the XP
formatted floppy.
I got this bit of information from the web-site of some university that was
having problems with students 9x floppies on the school's XP machines. They
gave details but, I don't recall what they were.
There could be an alignment problem but most likely, because you are having
this problem with WindowsXP, is that the media descriptor byte in the Bios
parameter block on this diskette is missing. This is usually the case with
older pre-formatted floppies. The media descriptor block indicates the type
of medium. MS-DOS or Windows 95 did not use this byte so they would see this
disk just fine. The only way you can correct this is by reformatting this
diskette with WindowsXP (you may be able to find an disk editor that can
change this media descriptor byte. The alternative is to use MS-DOS or
Windows 95 (maybe Windows 98) to copy the contents of this disk.
Many folks report that their PCs with XP like to only read floppies
formatted whists in XP. In other words, if you are going to use floppies
on both XP and win98 PCs, format them using the XP box. This way, when
you use the disks on the win98 pc to get files the disks should work on
the xp pc.
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