HELP! Floppy disks not recognized by XP anymore!

[corinthos]

I have like 10 floppy disks that were working fine but now aren't recognized by XP.
I can't figure out why that is, but when I put in a disk XP says it's not formatted and asks me if I wish to format it.

All I can think of is that I ran Knoppix off of CD one day and accessed some if not all of those floppies to see what files were on each of them. Maybe I temporarily set them next to my monitor or speakers, but I don't think so.. I think the closest they got to them was 4 feet away sitting on a coffee table. Hmmmm....

Anyone know how I can regain access to these floppies under XP? BTW, I also booted Knoppix again to see if I could access those floppies under Linux... I put in 1 disk and it took like 15 seconds trying to read it and then I got a message saying the mounting point wasn't recognized or something.. then when I tried a 2nd disk, it no longer tried reading for 15 seconds.. this time immediately that popup message about unrecognized mounting path appeared.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[tyanni]

If neither Knoppix or XP will recognize them. the floppy's are bad. Floppys are not a good place to put any files you care about. I'd try a data recovery tool to see if one of them can pull anything off of them.

Tim

 

[corinthos]

update: i found that the problem could be screwed up "media descriptor byte" or whatever and that xp comes with a tool called dskprobe.exe that may be able to fix that... but I don't know how to use it on the floppy.. the knowledge base article on Microsoft's site didn't go into detail about that and only provided info on what to change once you get the editor up.

anyone familiar with dskprobe able to help?

update 2: it appears I cannot even reformat the disks under XP! hmmm

 

[Woody419]

Probably a dead floppy drive. $11.50 at Newegg and all your problems will go away.

If Knoppix or a Bart's Boot disk don't read a floppy, then it ain't a Windows problem, just like tyanni said.

 

[Slowlearner]

Find an older pc w/Win98, blow the dust off the floppies, move the metal sleeve back and forth a couple of times and you should be fine

 

[corinthos]

hi again, thanks for your replies...

so it turns out my trusty samsung floppy disk drive finally pooped out on me... and that's why I've been having the above problems...

strange thing is I thought the samsungs were supposed to be some of the most reliable and quietest out there... yet my mitsumis which I bought later are outlasting it. oh well.

anyway, I'm thinking about just ditching floppy disk drives from my system entirely so I don't have to deal with redundancy errors and what not. the only reason i kept this FDD was because I could access the data (and write) on the floppies anywhere on campus since just about all the computers, mac or pc, have floppy access..

so if i ditch floppies, what is another option that would be usable just about anywhere?
would usb drives be accessible anywhere with a usb port? cd/cdrw are out since i can't write to those... i guess i could just email documents/attachments to myself and then download them from my email account. just wondering if there were other options...

lastly, are there any situations where only a floppy will do and cds won't work? like bios updates or some utility that you need to boot off a disk with? or is everything pretty much bootable from disc nowadays?

thanks!