used drive A earlier, now unable to open

[Guest]

I have the XP home edition and Word 97. Earlier today I saved a document to
drive A, closed the program, and left the PC running. About 2 hours later I
returned to continue working on the same earlier document, only when I
attempted to open the drive A disk, I kept receiving the message that I did
not have access to drive A and to see my administrator for access. The
problem is this is a family machine with access available to my wife and
myself. I have received this message before and dealt with it by shutting
down the machine and restarting. I attempted this about four times leaving
the PC turned off for differing lengths of time. The strategy did not work
this time. Any other suggestions?

 

[Graham Mayor]

The disc is probably corrupt. Never ever read from, write to or print from
floppy with Word. This is the most certain method of ensuring document (even
disc) corruption. Copy to the hard disc and work on the document from there.
This is equally relevant to other removable media such as CDRW.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Charles Kenyon]

If you want to be able to use your documents, when working within Word, act
as if your floppy drive does not exist! (This applies to CDRW/CDR drives as
well.)
Don't use Word to:
Open a document on a floppy
Print a document on a floppy
Edit a document on a floppy
Save a document to a floppy (not even a copy)

Word regularly trashes documents on floppy drives!

Instead, work on the document using your hard drive. Copy it back and forth
using Windows.

I know that for some with shared computers (libraries, schools) this is a
tough prescription. All I can recommend for that is to use a brand new
formatted disk each time you save and don't do any editing.
--
Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide

See also the MVP FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word which is awesome!
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[Guest]

Charles Kenyon:

Thanks for the information, another "First Responder" essentially said the
same thing. I do have the disk being looked at to see if there is a
possibility of retrieving any data. I'm not overly hopeful; I'll probably
have to score one for the school of hard knocks. I appreciate your taking
the time to answer.

 

[Guest]

Graham Mayor:

Thanks for the response. You and another person said essentially the same
thing, "3 1/2 floppy bad." I never knew that floppies were so useless; of
course, with this initiation into the world of lost data, I do now. I
appreciate your responding. Thanks again.