I've bought a new 250gb hard drive but for some reason my floppy drive wont work. Ive tried 2 different leads and 3 different floppy drives, and 9 different disks and just cant work out whats wrong ?!?!

It keeps coming up that the disk needs formatting so I say Yes and then it says disk cannot be formatted ?!?!?!

Anyone have any ideas ?!

When I did the original install a few years ago I kept a copy of the sata rivers on disk but this doesn't work either ?!

Anyone know a simple way of using a usb drive to install the sata drivers ?!?!

 

So you are trying to format a floppy disc? Make sure the write protect isn't on on the disc, thats the little black slider in the corner of the disc.

Another way to install drivers is to go to Start > Control panel > System > Hardware > Device manager, find the drive, right click on it then select update driver.

 

Rich, the drive(s) wont read a disk, just says do you want to format so I do the yes option, as for Device Manager it says both the drive and floppy controller are both working. Surely I cant have 9 floppy disks that all of a sudden don't work ?

 

FDD set correctly in BIOS?

Can you find a disk image of the SATA disk? If you can you should be able to mount it as a virtual drive using magicISO or the like.

Just off out, but will check back later on

 

Where exactly are you stuck? Are you installing Windows onto this new blank 250GB drive? Are you having problems with the floppy drive after you installed this new hard disk?

At a guess are you stuck at the "F6" prompt for additional storage drivers during Windows setup?

Device Manager will only tell you a device isn't working if Windows couldn't load the driver for it - Device Manager neither knows nor cares if the device works properly.

New floppy disks are crap and desperately unreliable, and so is Windows' ability to write to them properly. Windows never did deal with floppies properly. An old machine with DOS and a reliable floppy drive (they don't make em like they used to) is a Godsend when working with floppies.

If your BIOS can access a USB device at boot time (ie, before Windows loads), you might be able to format a USB flash drive on another machine, and copy the drivers to that, then use that instead of the floppy disk as the BIOS will emulate drive A: with the flash drive (leave the USB flash drive connected to a USB port before and throughout Windows Setup).

 

cheers guys, sorry for the lack of response, I've got tonsillitis and feel bloody awful.

Coz, alas, my bios doesn't support usb as a bootable option but you are correct, I am trying to install a fresh copy of xp on the new blank drive.

Adrian, not quite sure what your on about? the drive is recognised in the bios as the 320gb drive its supposed to be (not the 250gb I keep thinking I ORIGINALLY BOUGHT)

I've been reading up on the net and it seems the easiest option is to download nlite and add the sata drivers to disk. Never heard of the program until yesterday so fingers crossed as I haven't got the foggiest as to what to do!!!!

Doesn't it seem a little strange though that after attempting to get the floppy drive by replacing it with 3 different drives,2 different leads ad using several different leads that it still wont read the bloody disk ????

 

All I asked was is the Floppy Disk Drive showing correctly in the BIOS (not as a 720k but a 1.44mb)

 

FDD is assigned correctly,after faffing around all morning I've got it working !!That nLite program really is sooooo easy and a god send to use !

 

Cool. to the nLite app