"Zootal" <nospam@spam.zootal.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9D0C8384F8785nospamspamzootalnosp@216.196.97.131...
> Here is a bit of an off the wall problem. When running Win7, I can neither
> format nor write to a disk in the floppy drive. Boot to XP, and it works
> fine. Are there known issues with Windoes 7 writing to floppy drives?
I'm running Win7 and my internal floppy drive (which I haven't used in a
couple of years) works fine.
1. Check in Device Manager under Floppy Disk Drives and verify that it's
showing up.
2. If it shows up in Device Manager select it and look under the General tab
to make sure it's listed as working properly.
3. If it's there but not working properly go to the Drivers tab and make
sure it's not disabled and also that it has a functioning driver. (those
choices will make sense when you get there)
Hopefully this will shine a light on the problem. Since you can use it when
booting under XP it seems to me that the motherboard recognizes the hardware
so it's got to be either somehow disabled or there is a driver issue under
Windows 7. You don't say if you are 32 bit XP and 64 bit Windows 7
etc...that I suppose could also make a difference. Wish I had something more
definitive to help you but the steps above will at least be a good start
towards troubleshooting.
Seeing as how floppy drives are aging legacy devices with no current
practicality save for resurrecting old archives I would suggest that if you
cannot get it working under Windows 7 that you simply boot under XP and copy
all of your floppies to a more universal format and give the drive a nice
burial!
You are going to find that the magnetic floppy media are
deteriorating anyway just like magnetic tape and your old discs are going to
become less reliable to the point of breaking down and becoming unreadable.
The time is now to preserve all those old memories and data onto a more
modern medium. One cheap 4 GB thumb drive I suspect will hold ALL of the
data on your old floppies unless you really have a ton of them.