I have a question about Stop Windows from Altering Floppy Disks:

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I just took a look and it seems pretty clear - what's the question?


On Monday, January 6, 2003 at 7:11 am, melanie r wrote:
>I have a question about Stop
>Windows from Altering Floppy Disks:

>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

>My question was two part - a) can anyone tell me why windows xp is holding memory from a previous disk and not allowing me to access memory from disk in the floppy drive and b) can anyone tell me how to retrieve infomation on the floppy disk that says I cannot preview it although it appears to be there?


On Monday, January 6, 2003 at 7:14 am, Bob B wrote:
>I just took a look and it seems pretty clear - what's the question?

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I have experienced this with both CD and floppies. One thing you might try when the folder still reflects the old floppy, is to refresh the folder. (F5). It helped in my case.


On Monday, January 6, 2003 at 7:19 am, melanie r wrote:
>
>My question was two part - a) can anyone tell me why windows xp is holding memory
>from a previous disk and not allowing me to access memory from disk in the floppy
>drive and b) can anyone tell me how to retrieve infomation on the floppy disk that
>says I cannot preview it although it appears to be there?
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

My problem seems to be similar, but has caused some file corruption on a floppy. I've had 2 different problems. If I open a file (or just the directory) on floppy #1, then take that floppy out and insert a second floppy #2 (and again, either open a file, or just look at the directory), then reinsert floppy #1, it tells me that floppy 1 is not formatted. (I can open the floppy on a different computer, so it is formatted). 2nd problem: I did the same thing (opened a file on floppy #1, then opened a file on floppy 2, reinserted floppy #1 and tried to save a document I had changed). Instead of saving the document, it rewrote the directory of floppy #1 with the directory of floppy #2 and I lost some of the original files on floppy #1. Has anyone had a similar experience? Know any way to stop this? It has only occured since I started using Windows XP.


On Monday, January 6, 2003 at 11:57 am, Red Shadow wrote:
>I have experienced this with both CD and floppies. One thing you might try when the
>folder still reflects the old floppy, is to refresh the folder. (F5). It helped
>in my case.
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I have experienced similar problems trying to read floppies with XP. Sometimes when I insert a second floppy after reading the directory of the first floppy, hitting F5 will properly refresh the window, showing the directory of the second floppy. But sometimes it will not. The directory of the first floppy continues to appear, and nothing short of a system reboot will fix the problem. I have also experienced the problem of disk corruption that Debbie describes below. I have experienced this problem regularly on two different machines running XP, so I hope someone can soon suggest a solution!


On Wednesday, March 12, 2003 at 12:42 pm, Debbie Rockhill wrote:
>My problem seems to be similar, but has caused some file corruption on a floppy.
> I've had 2 different problems.
>
>If I open a file (or just the directory) on floppy #1, then take that floppy out
>and insert a second floppy #2 (and again, either open a file, or just look at the
>directory), then reinsert floppy #1, it tells me that floppy 1 is not formatted.
> (I can open the floppy on a different computer, so it is formatted).
>
>2nd problem: I did the same thing (opened a file on floppy #1, then opened a file
>on floppy 2, reinserted floppy #1 and tried to save a document I had changed). Instead
>of saving the document, it rewrote the directory of floppy #1 with the directory
>of floppy #2 and I lost some of the original files on floppy #1.
>
>Has anyone had a similar experience? Know any way to stop this? It has only occured
>since I started using Windows XP.
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

Is the option to auto detect removeable devices enabled. what is happening is the contents of the disk or cd are being held in memory - and ussually f5 will clear it and in some case it doesn't try disabling the autoinsert noficiation and see for the flopply - also I would suggest doing a hard ware testing on the floppy. not sure what benchmark programs allow testinf of the floppy . Trinnyg


On Sunday, May 18, 2003 at 4:11 pm, John A. Johnson wrote:
>I have experienced similar problems trying to read floppies with XP. Sometimes when
>I insert a second floppy after reading the directory of the first floppy, hitting
>F5 will properly refresh the window, showing the directory of the second floppy.
>But sometimes it will not. The directory of the first floppy continues to appear,
>and nothing short of a system reboot will fix the problem. I have also experienced
>the problem of disk corruption that Debbie describes below. I have experienced this
>problem regularly on two different machines running XP, so I hope someone can soon
>suggest a solution!
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

Strange but it seems to affect a lot of XP users. A friend of mine just came up with the same problem. The content of the second floppy wouldn't display, no matter how many times he hit F5. It would appear that there is a problem in XP with some type of floppy drives. Where do you enable the option to auto detect removable devices?


On Sunday, June 15, 2003 at 5:56 pm, Trinnyg wrote:
>Is the option to auto detect removeable devices enabled. what is happening is the
>contents of the disk or cd are being held in memory - and ussually f5 will clear
>it and in some case it doesn't try disabling the autoinsert noficiation and see for
>the flopply -
>
>also I would suggest doing a hard ware testing on the floppy. not sure what benchmark
>programs allow testinf of the floppy .
>
>Trinnyg
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I have experienced the very same problem (XP Home on Celeron 1.7) but I found F5 to be useless in this scenario and having looked and MS's online support found nothing of any help. Hope someone finds something soon.


On Saturday, June 28, 2003 at 4:08 am, stefan wrote:
>Strange but it seems to affect a lot of XP users. A friend of mine just came up with
>the same problem. The content of the second floppy wouldn't display, no matter how
>many times he hit F5. It would appear that there is a problem in XP with some type
>of floppy drives. Where do you enable the option to auto detect removable devices?
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I just fixed this on an NT4 machine. It was a loose floppy cable. This fault is caused by line 34 not connecting and will be a bad connector, bad or loose cable, or bad floppy drive. Best to check the cable first.


On Monday, October 6, 2003 at 1:50 am, MasterBoot wrote:
>I have experienced the very same problem (XP Home on Celeron 1.7) but I found F5
>to be useless in this scenario and having looked and MS's online support found nothing
>of any help. Hope someone finds something soon.
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

My problem is that I can't open most of my floppies, even the newest ones, since I bought a PC with XP on it. When I open them all it has in the list to the right is a README.TXT Text Document. If I refresh it says the floppy needs to be formatted, which you do NOT want to do or you will lose what's on it. This is a new PC, so no chance of a lose connection or bad floppy drive. What now?


On Wednesday, January 14, 2004 at 9:48 am, dylan_73 wrote:
>
>I just fixed this on an NT4 machine. It was a loose floppy cable. This fault is
>caused by line 34 not connecting and will be a bad connector, bad or loose cable,
>or bad floppy drive. Best to check the cable first.
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

New or not, it sounds like one of the aforementioned problems. Maybe a cable slipped loose in delivery? If you think it might be a software problem, try creating a boot disk on another machine, and boot your machine from it. If it can't read that, then you know it's hardware.


On Friday, February 13, 2004 at 2:48 am, Tx_DreamWeaver wrote:
>My problem is that I can't open most of my floppies, even the newest ones, since
>I bought a PC with XP on it. When I open them all it has in the list to the right
>is a README.TXT Text Document. If I refresh it says the floppy needs to be formatted,
>which you do NOT want to do or you will lose what's on it. This is a new PC, so no
>chance of a lose connection or bad floppy drive. What now?
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I have experienced similar problems with disks on an XP Machine. This same machine previausly worked under NT perfectly well. After installing XP I could no longer read floppy disks. More: New floppys are rendered unusable after inserting them in the drive for the first time. I can use them in many other PCs (WIN 98, WIN NT 4.0, etc, at work) until I feed them in this XP machine and it crashes. It's something on the XP, but it depends on the hardware, this does occur only in certain XP PCs.


On Friday, February 13, 2004 at 4:46 am, dylan_73 wrote:
>
>New or not, it sounds like one of the aforementioned problems. Maybe a cable slipped
>loose in delivery? If you think it might be a software problem, try creating a boot
>disk on another machine, and boot your machine from it. If it can't read that, then
>you know it's hardware.
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I have a similar problem in Win XP. I am not only able to see the contents but also open files from the floppy drive using windows explorer even after i have removed the last floppy. Refreshing does not work. The cache or temporary memory is cleared only if i disable the floppy drive and enable it again.


On Thursday, February 19, 2004 at 7:23 pm, Mike wrote:
>I have experienced similar problems with disks on an XP Machine. This same machine
>previausly worked under NT perfectly well. After installing XP I could no longer
>read floppy disks. More: New floppys are rendered unusable after inserting them in
>the drive for the first time. I can use them in many other PCs (WIN 98, WIN NT 4.0,
>etc, at work) until I feed them in this XP machine and it crashes. It's something
>on the XP, but it depends on the hardware, this does occur only in certain XP PCs.
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

This worked. I had the exact same problem. I took the case off and sure enough, the wire had come out on one side. Slid the wire back in and my problem is resolved. Sometimes, things like humidity can cause a wire to come loose - even on new computers.


On Friday, February 13, 2004 at 4:46 am, dylan_73 wrote:
>
>New or not, it sounds like one of the aforementioned problems. Maybe a cable slipped
>loose in delivery? If you think it might be a software problem, try creating a boot
>disk on another machine, and boot your machine from it. If it can't read that, then
>you know it's hardware.
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I thought I was going mad - until I found this forum... I checked the cable and sure enough - it was loose... this fixed the problem of the disk still appearing to be accesible even though it is not in the drive... of course I ran a virus check and a spyware check before I found this place!!! - 2 minutes work becomes an hours chore!! AARGH!


On Wednesday, February 25, 2004 at 2:58 am, Nalin Saxena wrote:
>
>I have a similar problem in Win XP. I am not only able to see the contents but also
>open files from the floppy drive using windows explorer even after i have removed
>the last floppy. Refreshing does not work. The cache or temporary memory is cleared
>only if i disable the floppy drive and enable it again.
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I'm having a related problem. I have a computer that multi-boots: WinNT 40 Server, Win98SE, Win2K Server, Win 2003 Server. I can use a floppy several times when I running any OS except Win 2003 Server. Once I write to the disk under Win 2003 Server, I get the error message when I try to read the disk. Same floppy drive, different OS. Same thing under Win XP.


On Wednesday, March 12, 2003 at 12:42 pm, Debbie Rockhill wrote:
>My problem seems to be similar, but has caused some file corruption on a floppy.
> I've had 2 different problems.
>
>If I open a file (or just the directory) on floppy #1, then take that floppy out
>and insert a second floppy #2 (and again, either open a file, or just look at the
>directory), then reinsert floppy #1, it tells me that floppy 1 is not formatted.
> (I can open the floppy on a different computer, so it is formatted).
>
>2nd problem: I did the same thing (opened a file on floppy #1, then opened a file
>on floppy 2, reinserted floppy #1 and tried to save a document I had changed). Instead
>of saving the document, it rewrote the directory of floppy #1 with the directory
>of floppy #2 and I lost some of the original files on floppy #1.
>
>Has anyone had a similar experience? Know any way to stop this? It has only occured
>since I started using Windows XP.
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

OK, Whether I have a loose cable or whatever caused the directory of floppy #2 to be overwritten by floopy #1, does anyone know how to recover the files whose directory I can no longer see?


On Tuesday, January 11, 2005 at 8:35 am, ComputerUser wrote:
>This worked. I had the exact same problem. I took the case off and sure enough,
>the wire had come out on one side. Slid the wire back in and my problem is resolved.
> Sometimes, things like humidity can cause a wire to come loose - even on new computers.
>
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

I have the same problem and thought that my disks were bad, it has now happened on several XP machines, I have even replaced my floppy drive twice thinking it was a hardware issue. My instance seems more like a compatibility issue with XP and there seem to be a lot of users in the same boat...hmmm is that a bug I smell!

On Wednesday, March 12, 2003 at 12:42 pm, Debbie Rockhill wrote: My problem seems to be similar, but has caused some file corruption on a floppy. I've had 2 different problems. If I open a file (or just the directory) on floppy #1, then take that floppy out and insert a second floppy #2 (and again, either open a file, or just look at the directory), then reinsert floppy #1, it tells me that floppy 1 is not formatted. (I can open the floppy on a different computer, so it is formatted). 2nd problem: I did the same thing (opened a file on floppy #1, then opened a file on floppy 2, reinserted floppy #1 and tried to save a document I had changed). Instead of saving the document, it rewrote the directory of floppy #1 with the directory of floppy #2 and I lost some of the original files on floppy #1. Has anyone had a similar experience? Know any way to stop this? It has only occurred since I started using Windows XP.

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

Apart from hardware problems, contrary to win 9x, I believe XP like 2000 & NT checks the second FAT table for consistency with the first. If there is a mismatch then the disc is unreadbale in XP and it reports that the disk needs reformatting. Uuugh! I use Norton 7 ish disk doctor to fix 2nd FAT table problems. However I have also seen clusters within files corrupted again with the kind suggestion that the disk needs reformatting. Again I use Norton 7 Disk Edit to copy the file to the C drive and Abort the duff clusters. This leaves me with a working copy of text files albeit with holes in it. For more complex files they are probably rendered useless. I also use multiple copies of XPs Briefcase to maintain backups of floppies say one for odd days and one for even! ESSENTIAL!


On Thursday, February 2, 2006 at 5:10 am, Zzzzz wrote:
>I have the same problem and thought that my disks were bad, it has now happened on
>several XP machines, I have even replaced my floppy drive twice thinking it was a
>hardware issue. My instance seems more like a compatibility issue with XP and there
>seem to be a lot of users in the same boat...hmmm is that a bug I smell!
>
>
>
>

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