formatting difficulties

[Fred]

My sister was on earlier and said there was difficulty
with the A drive. So I came on and indeed, there was a
little problem. She's an aspiring writer, she's had a
half dozen 3 1/2 inch floppies she's used over the years.
The one in particular that made her realize this problem
is 3 years old. It has been formatted. However, my
computer doesn't recognize it as being, and wouldn't let
her open it.

She didn't want to format the floppy and lose all her
work so she used a brand new disc to try and save. But
she wasn't able to format the new disk either. I've tried
repeatedly and I am running into the same trouble. I
don't see an error message or number, just a little line
that says XP can't format the disk.

These are 1.44 mb disks, made by imation, and supposedly
preformatted. Anyone able to help?

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Fred;
Your floppy drive may be going bad.
Try the floppies in another computer or another floppy drive.

Using floppies for 3 years is a recipe for lost data.