Floppy Disk Drive

There is no need to make floppies for recovery. The Windows XP cd and the PM cd are both bootable. From PM help:

Is there a way to use a bootable CD as the PartitionMagic rescue disk?

There is no need to make a bootable PartitionMagic CD. The PartitionMagic 8.0 program CD is already bootable and allows you to run PartitionMagic from it.  

Make sure you are using PM 8 which is needed for XP.

Bull, first of all there has not been a 320KByte drive since before the demise of the 5 1/4 floppy disk, probly ended at DOS 2.0.  Basically all current disks are 3 1/2 inch 1.44 MBytes.  I have been able to format them on a 3 1/2 year old Inspiron 5000, a 2 1/2 year old PWS 530 and a six month old PE 1600SC server,  with no problems.  The first two PCs are running Wondows XP Pro and the third is running Windows 2003 server.  All the machines use retail copies of their respective versions of the OS.  I loaded no special drivers.  The three Dell Optiplex SX270 about a year old, machines I am using at school for my Networking class were loaded by me with retail version of the OS no special drivers were required.  Try some different disks or try your disks on a different machine.  P.S. As far as I know, and I go way back, the only 320KBytes drive was a 5 1/2 drive, an it was actually a two sided 160KByte disk 

This is bull "I have been told that most floppy drives over the past 3 years have been 3-mode drives (320, 720 and 1.44) but only 1.44 can be formatted under XP and that 3-mode drives require special driver support and that support comes from Dell", not your problem.  What I was trying to explain was there is no 320KByte floppy, and I was further trying to point out your problem is elsewhare, What form? where?

Message Edited by msgale on 11-23-2003 04:31 PM

Did this Floppy box actually say the Floppy's were PC Formated or MS-DOS Formated as if MS-DOS Formated they  need to be Formated using XP.

Message Edited by gryjhnhpe on 11-24-2003 09:16 AM

msgale,

Good that everything is working out right for you!  However, everything is not working out right here and you didn't address my problem:  3-mode and 5-6 passes.

Personally, I don't think that "Bull" is the proper way to start out a reply to a problem. 

From another forum, I know that others are having a similar problem to mine and a respected member brought up the 3-mode drive as a possible problem that may have to be solved by the OEM.  That is why I am here.

Mary, I will research your answer and I thank you.  What concerns me about that is that when I ran PM 8.0 it asked me to insert a 3.5 in. floppy to make 2 recovery disks.  Now I have the 8.01 CD and when I install that I'm anticipating that it will ask me to do the same.

Any other thoughts?  Thanks.

John

 

Gary,

The box says PC Formatted and the disk itself says IBM Formatted.

Thanks for your reply.

John

jbxcpa, I just formatted some floppies on a Dimension 4500 that I give support to and the floppies formatted. Try this-put a floppy in the drive. Go to Windows Explorer and high light this drive and click on Format. On my Dimension that I am using right now it reads: Capacity: 3.5'', 1.44MB, 512bytes/sector,File Sys: FAT, Allocation unit size: Default Allocation Size, Format Options-you should see several choices. Put a tick in Quick Format.

You might find a re-start of Windows fixes the problem.
Just Logoff then Logon to re-start Windows.

aps@sun, that is exactly what I do and what I see, but when I check Quick Format (all windows closed) and then continue, I wind up with the following message: "Windows cannot format this drive.  Quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of the drive.  Then try again".  Very frustrating, but after 5-6 tries it formats the disk.  I had 8 disks that I did the same way.  40-50 passes?  Shouldn't be.

John

jbxcpa,

Open the computer case and disconnect then reconnect the ribbon cable leading to the floppy drive. Try the format again. If it doesn't work the first time there is a good possibility that you have a defective floppy drive.

jbxcpa, I feel your pain. Working out computer problems is time consuming and painful. Here are a few things you can try. Under format options where you have three choices the first being ___Quick Format, do not check ANY of the options.

Another thing you can try is going to Windows Explorer. Left Click on your C Drive. Then right click on your A Drive (your Floppy drive). Using the right mouse button select Format and give it a try from here.

 

http://www.advancedcomputers.co.nz/help.asp#q7  This is similar/same to the second option.

 

msgale,

Sorry, I misunderstood you.  My apologies.  Did some research and found that you are right.  320 and 1.2 are 5.25. 720 and 1.44 are 3.5. And 720 cannot be formatted by XP.  That leaves 1.44MB supported and should format under XP.  So, 3-mode drive is a moot question.  Why my computer can't format remains the question and it might come down to "I should have chosen another box of diskettes instead of the one I did choose".  I understand that these disks are formatted by burning an image to the disk and that the image might not always be placed properly.  Not sure about this tho.

Gary, I went thru 4 restarts to format 8 disks.  Shouldn't have to do that.

aps@sun, I'll try your ideas out if Denny's doesn't do the trick.

Denny, I will disconnect and reconnect the drive later on tonite.  Right now I am recording a movie from one of the major TV channels using MyHD and rooftop antenna.  HDTV on computer...life is good.  I will report back tomorrow nite.

Thanks for all the help.

John

you said you are using "quick format". try doing a regular format.. a quick format leaves some infomation on the floppy.. maybe that is causing the problem.

 

Message Edited by redwolfe_98 on 11-24-2003 08:36 AM

when i rightclick "a", i have the option "format".. then, when i click that, it brings up another box, with various options... "quick format", one of the options, is not enabled, by default. i am using win xp home, too.. 

Redwolfe_98,

When I right click Drive A, the only option I get is to do a Quick Format.  I have XP Home.  How do you do a regular format?

I went thru another box of disks.  A couple formatted at first pass, some at 2, 3 and 4 passes; all after disconnecting and reconnecting Drive A.  Then I went to command prompt with Format A: /U and the remainder formatted on first pass.  Seems this is the way to go for me.

Thanks for all the help.

John