grr @ floppy disk drives

FishPolice

FishPolice

FishPolice

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I hate the damn things :mad:

Every time I've built a system I've ended up buying a new floppy disk drive. They work fine to begin with & I find them useful for installing SATA drivers etc. A few months down the line and the damn thing won't play ball..
Like tonight: I format a fresh floppy, stick a Curse of Monkey Island saved game on it from my son's pc, insert it into the floppy drive on my pc and now it tells me it needs to be formatted. My son's pc floppy drive reads the disk fine but my drive just hangs or tells me the disk is not formatted.
WTF am I doing wrong? Is it the (previously virgin) floppy disk itself that's knackered or is my drive that's on the way out. It reads some floppies fine one minute & the next minute it says they're unformatted. Tried different cables but that never solves these problems.
I'm guessing it's the floppy disks themselves. What's a good make to go for?
 
orderoftheflame said:
Your son has amazing taste in games :)

sorry for Off topic!
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hehe thanks I'll tell him you said that -he'll be chuffed to bits :D

Actually, he's only 9 so most of the jokes & puzzles go way over his head but sometimes he really surprises me when he figures out a fiendish puzzle on his own when me & the missus have been stumped for hours :D
 
Strange... I've had the same floppy drive for about 4 years or something now. I haven't used it for a looong time though. Maybe dust is clogging up in yours or something?
 
It's a pretty new system (been up & running since about May 06) & I wouldn't expect it to be that dusty yet but I shall have a look at it tomorrow. I'm hoping it's something simple like the quality of the media. I don't suppose much care is taken with the manufacture of floppies these days after all.
I've experienced problems with PC Line, BASF & Imation disks so far. I don't think I spent much on these.
 
Try the floppy cable in the other way around, put the connector in the drive at the moment in the motherboard. If I remember right, I had this problem the other day.
 
monkeypants said:
Try the floppy cable in the other way around, put the connector in the drive at the moment in the motherboard. If I remember right, I had this problem the other day.
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heh that sounds crazy enough to work :D

Will let you know tomorrow if it fixes it
 
Can't really be the cable orientation if it works with some floppies. Wrong cable orentation would make it never work.
 
IIRC if the little green floppy light is constantly on then the cable is connected the wrong way round, if not then it should all be good! So check that ;)
 
Hi, this is the problem with 3.5" floppies and drives. What tends to happen is, the heads of each floppy drive are aligned different, so just because the disc can be read and written to on your son's PC, the heads on your drives are set different or maybe your sons have more wear than your drive.

I have seen this back in the day when floppies were mainstream, like early PC's, Amiga's, ST and I had it when I was in college. Used to save my work in college on certain machines and could not read it on mine or other college PC due to the variations in drive head mechanisms.

Anthony
 
I think you are probabaly right acharris. I reckon some of the disks themselves are probably at fault too -they've always been stored nicely so I can't imagine they've been damaged. Just cheap & nasty most likely.
I did almost manage to transfer a file from his pc to mine this morning but I ended up with a CRC error at the last second.

Anyway, what can I use in future instead of floppy drives?
Can't see myself spending more than about £20-30 though so perhaps I should get him a CDRW. Ideally I'd like to get his pc networked to my router so we could transfer files directly, play lan games together & he could do the occasional surfing but I don't want him getting addicted to the net just yet & I don't know how well I can trust baby sitting software to keep him away from dodgy internet stuff.
 
I reckon it's the floppys themselves.

I know for a fact that they aren't making floppies like they used to because businesses used to rely on them for their storage media and I have 10-15 year old floppies that work perfectly. These days I'll make a boot disk or similar for my toolkit and a few moths down the line it will be unuseable.
 
USB drive is for the win - very cheap and can be used in any Win98SE machine or better by default (usually)

If you have to rely (never know how to spell that word lol) on floppy drives, usb ones seem to be more robust and work better in my opinion.

PS I agree about Monkey Island, absolute classic!!!
 
Jonny69 said:
I reckon it's the floppys themselves.

I know for a fact that they aren't making floppies like they used to because businesses used to rely on them for their storage media and I have 10-15 year old floppies that work perfectly. These days I'll make a boot disk or similar for my toolkit and a few moths down the line it will be unuseable.
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Yeah it's so annoying when you absolutely need to use a floppy & it won't work anymore. The old ones were pretty solid I seem to remember. These days you can crush them easily in one hand :D
 
VeNT said:
new floppy drive ~£6 1.44meg
new USB flash key ~£23 2gig
contest?
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no not really but as i only use SATA drives and xp dosn't let you load SATA drivers off a usb key, im sure Vista will allow this, so a floppy was absoloutly necessary for my old board. Now i have a board that will emulate my SATA drives to IDE hence not much need for my floppy anymore but they do still serve quite a purpose today.
 
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