Re: XP Home ruined my floppy drive!

From: Purple (vaitkus_at_pacbell.net)
Date: 08/25/04 

Date: 25 Aug 2004 10:55:14 -0700

"D.Currie" <dmbcurrie.nospam@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<2p2l81Fg8t2aU1@uni-berlin.de>...
> "Purple" <vaitkus@pacbell.net> wrote in message
> news:d9a19377.0408241439.214d492e@posting.google.com...
> > null <null@planetzero.com> wrote in message
> > news:<utR2RqgiEHA.596@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl>...
> >
> >> It is essentially impossible for an OS to destroy a floppy drive.
> >
> > That is what i thought too but it has happened with two drives now and
> > i cannot think of another explanation. Care to offer one?
>
> Here's one: as floppy disks and floppy drives are becoming essentially
> obsolete, quality is not a huge consideration. Last time I bought bulk
> floppy disks, quite a few were dead on the first try, some fell apart --
> literally -- after a few insertions, some failed after one or two boots, and
> some are working after multiple uses over months. These were name brand
> disks. Years ago, I would have expected floppy disk failure to be minimal.
> But that was in the days when floppies were the back-up medium of choice,
> and they had to be reliable.
>
> A bad floppy disk could conceivably ruin a drive, or it could be that the
> drive itself was just cheap and flawed. Manufacturers figure you're not
> going to use it often, so they can get away with the cheapest floppy drives
> possible. Even if it's under warranty, the chance of you bothering to return
> it is slim, considering how cheap the replacements are.

I have about 5 floppy drives in PC's in my house and none of them have
failed. Some have worked for years although I rarely use them.

My friend has had 3 drives in two computers and all of the drives have
failed after as little as 1 use. I suppose this could be coincidence
but it seems extreme to me to suggest some repeatable cause. Since the
only thing that is the same in both is systems in XP Home, it looked
like the most likely culprit.

Note that the disks are fine. They work in other floppy drives whereas
good disks do not work in the failed drives no matter what machine
they are in.

Microsoft has a knowledge base article on their lack of support for
some floppy drives in XP (so-called tri-mode drives) so I suspected an
OS problem or perhaps a motherboard problem. But the same drives that
worked at first now fail to work in other non-XP machines as well so I
concluded the floppy drives were toast. A mean-time-to-failure of 1 is
pretty hard to believe for such an old, stable piece of hardware.

Oh well, we will buy more floppy drives and keep trying.

Then again, none of this would even be necessary if Microsoft would
include SATA and RAID drivers on their install CD.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: floppy drive not reconising disks
    ... You should see the directory tree of the floppy disk. ... Restart your computer in Safe Mode using the instruction in step 3. ... Locate and delete floppy drives *and* the floppy disk controllers. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Dr. James Marsters, TTY deaf service developer [Telecom]
    ... Ward and Randy invented the BBS. ... Z80) a Hayes 300 baud modem card, a 3P+S board with the parallel ... The floppy drives of that time had 117vAC running the spindle ...
    (comp.dcom.telecom)
  • Re: Write 3.5" disk image in Windows
    ... pre-iMac floppy drives from Apple can spin in five speeds and those from ... hand the built-in disk port of a IIgs can only deal with 800 KB ...
    (comp.sys.apple2)
  • Re: How to get Floppy drive working
    ... WinXP is really finicky with floppy drives. ... mode, but can read 1.20MB, 720K, and 360K formatted disks. ... and XP wants me to format the disk. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: XP Home ruined my floppy drive!
    ... As long as you can specify Where to look for additional drivers, ... as floppy disks and floppy drives are becoming essentially ... >> floppy disks, quite a few were dead on the first try, some fell apart -- ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment)
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