No FAT or FAT32 access

[Percival P. Cassidy]

I have WinXP Home SP3 on one machine and find that I am no longer able
to access FAT32-formatted thumb drives or FAT-formatted floppies: I can
read them on other systems, but this machine tells me they are unformatted.

No anti-virus/internet security software is in operation when I try this.

I've so seldom used floppies or FAT32-formatted media on this machine
that a whole lot of changes will have taken place since it was able to
read such media successfully.

I insert a floppy that has been formatted on another machine.
DIR A: from command prompt reports no recognizable file system.
CHKDSK /F A: reports file system is FAT, no errors found.
DIR A: reports no recognizable file system.
FORMAT A: reports success.
CHKDSK /F A: reports file system is FAT, no errors found.
DIR A: reports no recognizable file system.

Double-click on disk icon in My Computer reports disk is not formatted.
RMB -> Format reports Windows cannot complete format.
CHKDSK /F A: reports file system is FAT, no errors found.
DIR A: reports no recognizable file system.
Take disk to another machine; CHKDSK /F A: reports that file system is
FAT, no errors found.
I copy files to that disk on that machine; success.
Bring disk back to the problem computer; DIR A: reports no recognizable
file system.

Google found a reference to this (or a similar) problem at

http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html

I copied the i386 folder from the installation CD to C:, made the
recommended changes to the registry, and ran

sfc /scannow

Nothing has changed as far as FAT-formatted media are concerned.

Perce

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I have WinXP Home SP3 on one machine and find that I am no longer able
to access FAT32-formatted thumb drives or FAT-formatted floppies: I can
read them on other systems, but this machine tells me they are unformatted.

Don't know what your problem with the thumb drive would be, but the
floppies are an easy case. Your floppy drives have gotten misaligned.
That happens quite often with floppies, and it's one the main reasons
nobody bothers with them anymore.

I suspect that your thumb drive problem might be a totally separate
problem. It's possible that the USB drivers don't recognize your thumb
drive. Microsoft used to make available a tool called UVCView.x86.exe
which was a very useful utility from Microsoft which lists detailed info
about USB connections on your machine. I don't know why they removed it.
However, you might want to try this utility instead. I have not tested
it myself but it sounds like it would be good, and it is open-source.

Usb Sniffer for Windows | Get Usb Sniffer for Windows at SourceForge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/usbsnoop/

Yousuf Khan

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Don't know what your problem with the thumb drive would be, but the
floppies are an easy case. Your floppy drives have gotten misaligned.
That happens quite often with floppies, and it's one the main reasons
nobody bothers with them anymore.

It's unlikely that that is the problem he is having with floppies. The
problem is almost certainly the media descriptor byte issue. Read here
for info on it: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=140060

 

[Percival P. Cassidy]

It's unlikely that that is the problem he is having with floppies. The
problem is almost certainly the media descriptor byte issue. Read here
for info on it: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=140060

That is talking about the inability to read a floppy disk that was
written on a machine using an OS predating Win98. The advice is:

"To resolve this problem, re-format the floppy disk with Windows 98,
Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or
Windows Server 2003."

But the disk will not format successfully on this XP machine. But in
fact WinXP is schizophrenic on this point: FORMAT and CHKDSK from a
command prompt think the disk is fine, although DIR has a problem with
it; nothing works using the RMB menu on the disk object: even the SCAN
tool simply quits with no error message of any kind.

I can't help thinking that a driver is missing or corrupted.

Somebody drew my attention to

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...ardware+author:rwehavnfunyet#f57221cfa9ab4d38

but that seems to be only for XP Pro and 64-bit XP. I have XP Home (32-bit).

Perce