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FDD strange problems

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Author Message
Guoxian
Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:23 pm:   

Hi,
I have a problem on my computer floppy disk drive 1.44MB
Here is the desription of the problem:

I have 2 floppy disk drives of 1.44 MB capacity. One of them is in my old computer and the other I just bought it not long ago is in my new computer

Now here is the problem that's been bugging me.
The diskettes I copy from my school computer and other places can only be read and written by the drive on the new computer. For the old drive, when I try to read disks in Win 95 OSR2, it takes very long to read and then gives me an applet asking me to format the disk as it was not formatted. ( the disk works in the new drive, though)

However, when I used a blank diskette and format using the old drive, I can copy files into the formatted disk. This files, unfortunately, cannot be seen by the new drive, which gives me the applet to format the disk.

I suspect this is a problem of misaligned heads but I could be wrong.
Can anyone help me Please?
Thank you.
depova
Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:23 pm:   

Check your bios settings and make sure they are both set a 1.44meg floppy. It sounds like your old drive is set at a lower setting like 720k or something like that. Hope this helps
Guoxian
Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:23 pm:   

Thank you for the advice but I've checked again and the settigs are correct as in 1.44MB floppy in bios and the formatted capacity for a floppy is abt 1.38MB in Win95
Dave
Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:24 pm:   

Try switching the drives between your two machines.
This will tell you whether it's your floppy or improper
configuration of your machine. 3.5" drives are about
$8 (used) where I live, so it's not worth fixing them,
"Once the floppy disk has been low-level formatted, the locations of
the tracks on the disk are fixed in place. Since floppies use a stepper
motor to drive the head actuator, the floppy drive must be aligned
properly in order to read the tracks on the disk. Sometimes the heads
of a particular drive can become out of alignment relative to where
they should be; when this happens you may notice that a disk formatted
on the misaligned drive will work in that drive but not in others, and
vice-versa." This interesting tidbit came from:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/fdd/media.htm
Lots of interesting stuff on this searchable tech
database.

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