A simple suggestion first: Make sure the floppy is enabled in the BIOS setup. Maybe your battery is going and the floppy setting has flipped. Even if it looks enabled, I would disable it, save, enable it and save again. A few problems have been solved this way.

Peter

Thanks , Peter, for answering. actually, I had uninstalled the floppy drive, then reinstalled it in the bios and continued to get the same message. should have mentioned that. But after a lot of aggravation I found http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812489 titled: The floppy disk drive is missing from the My Computer folder. This suggested that corrupted or incorrect keys in the registry caused my floppy drive problems. I followed its advice on eliminating filters in the registry, and, wow, I have a floppy drive again. I'm posting this so someone else with this problem can find an expense-free solution. again, thanks for your answer. This forum is a great reason to stick with Dell products. olivia

Good job! Thanks for the follow up.

I didn't know about the UpperFilters and LowerFilters issue.

On a side note, I picked up a USB floppy used for a few bucks and now use that instead of any internal floppies. It really works great and is very simple. New machines boot fine from it.

Peter