Win7 won't write to floppy drive - XP will

[Zootal]

Here is a bit of an off the wall problem. When running Win7, I can neither
format nor write to a disk in the floppy drive. Boot to XP, and it works
fine. Are there known issues with Windoes 7 writing to floppy drives?

 

[Philo F. Shagnasty]

What's a floppy drive?

 

[milt]

What's a floppy drive?

People still use those?

 

[Grenou]

Here is a bit of an off the wall problem. When running Win7, I can neither
format nor write to a disk in the floppy drive. Boot to XP, and it works
fine. Are there known issues with Windoes 7 writing to floppy drives?

No problem here.
I saved your post to a floppy and it showed up ok.

Grenou

 

[Dave \Crash\ Dummy]

Here is a bit of an off the wall problem. When running Win7, I can
neither format nor write to a disk in the floppy drive. Boot to XP,
and it works fine. Are there known issues with Windoes 7 writing to
floppy drives?

For the first time in my computer life I don't have a floppy drive, but
I know they work on Win7. I suggest you open Device Manager on the
Control Panel and check out Floppy Drive Controllers. Maybe that will
shed some light on why yours doesn't work.

 

[Zootal]

For the first time in my computer life I don't have a floppy drive, but
I know they work on Win7. I suggest you open Device Manager on the
Control Panel and check out Floppy Drive Controllers. Maybe that will
shed some light on why yours doesn't work.

I'm building a spare box and it had neither floppy nor CD. But for some
reason, it won't boot from a USB stick if the HD is connected no matter how
I set the bios. Pull the IDE cable, it boots from the USB stick quite
nicely - which doesn't do me any good because I need the drive there after
I boot. So I had to stick a floppy drive in it. I've got 4 or 5 of them
sitting on a shelf in my office, but unfortunately we haven't yet reached
the point where we can get rid of them for good

I looked at device manager, and it was happy as can be. There is nothing in
any of the event logs. This is actually the first time I tried to use the
floppy drive with Win7, it's not something I do often. Once I'm done
setting a system up, I seldom use the floppy. It also reads just fine, it
just won't write without corrupting the disk.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Zootal.

Maybe YOUR Win7 can't write floppies, but mine does it just fine. ;<)

In fact, I've had to read and write floppies this week because one of my
HDDs died (and was replaced by Seagate under warranty). That was the SATA
drive that held my WinXP installed, among many other things. As you may
recall, WinXP does not have native drivers for SATA drives; these must be
added during Setup by doing what we lovingly call "the F6-Floppy shuffle".
So I had to find the drivers on my remaining HDD, running Win7, and copy
those to floppy before I could boot from the WinXP CD-ROM and run Setup.exe
to install it on my replacement HDD - being sure to press F6 very early in
the Setup process.

I'm sure glad that MY Win7 handles floppies at least as well as any prior
Windows version. ;<)

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64

 

[LouB]

I'm building a spare box and it had neither floppy nor CD. But for some
reason, it won't boot from a USB stick if the HD is connected no matter how
I set the bios. Pull the IDE cable, it boots from the USB stick quite
nicely - which doesn't do me any good because I need the drive there after
I boot. So I had to stick a floppy drive in it. I've got 4 or 5 of them
sitting on a shelf in my office, but unfortunately we haven't yet reached
the point where we can get rid of them for good

I looked at device manager, and it was happy as can be. There is nothing in
any of the event logs. This is actually the first time I tried to use the
floppy drive with Win7, it's not something I do often. Once I'm done
setting a system up, I seldom use the floppy. It also reads just fine, it
just won't write without corrupting the disk.

You are sure the drive is OK - as it works in another machine?

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

[email protected]:

I'm building a spare box and it had neither floppy nor CD. But for some
reason, it won't boot from a USB stick if the HD is connected no matter how
I set the bios. Pull the IDE cable, it boots from the USB stick quite
nicely - which doesn't do me any good because I need the drive there after
I boot. So I had to stick a floppy drive in it. I've got 4 or 5 of them
sitting on a shelf in my office, but unfortunately we haven't yet reached
the point where we can get rid of them for good

I looked at device manager, and it was happy as can be. There is nothing in
any of the event logs. This is actually the first time I tried to use the
floppy drive with Win7, it's not something I do often. Once I'm done
setting a system up, I seldom use the floppy. It also reads just fine, it
just won't write without corrupting the disk.

Floppy works fine here, but I'm using a USB drive, not an internal
drive.

To tell the truth, I didn't know computers had floppy controllers any
more

Maybe you can solve the USB stick problem...I can't, sorry.

 

[Zootal]

You are sure the drive is OK - as it works in another machine?

It works fine if I just boot to a different OS in the same machine...

 

[Zootal]

Floppy works fine here, but I'm using a USB drive, not an internal

drive.

To tell the truth, I didn't know computers had floppy controllers any
more

Maybe you can solve the USB stick problem...I can't, sorry.

I haven't yet had a board that didn't have a floppy controller - I'm sure
they are there, but all of mine have them. Booting from a USB stick is not
as realiable as booting from a floppy - ie. booting from a floppy always
works. I have one board that won't boot from a USB stick if IDE0 is
connected. I have another that only works if the USB stick is in a certain
port. It's kinda like plug and pray...um...plug and play - it mostly works
but is still quirky.

I'm getting the idea that this is not a common problem - lucky me! I just
boot to XP to do the floppy writes I needed - I just needed to make some
partition magic boot disks. Boot to XP, run the PM floppy disk maker,
reboot back to Win7, end of story. Six months from now I'll try to write
something to a floppy disk and then remember, oh yeah, can't do that from
Win7...<gg>...

 

[Charles Tomaras]

Here is a bit of an off the wall problem. When running Win7, I can neither
format nor write to a disk in the floppy drive. Boot to XP, and it works
fine. Are there known issues with Windoes 7 writing to floppy drives?

I'm running Win7 and my internal floppy drive (which I haven't used in a
couple of years) works fine.

1. Check in Device Manager under Floppy Disk Drives and verify that it's
showing up.

2. If it shows up in Device Manager select it and look under the General tab
to make sure it's listed as working properly.

3. If it's there but not working properly go to the Drivers tab and make
sure it's not disabled and also that it has a functioning driver. (those
choices will make sense when you get there)

Hopefully this will shine a light on the problem. Since you can use it when
booting under XP it seems to me that the motherboard recognizes the hardware
so it's got to be either somehow disabled or there is a driver issue under
Windows 7. You don't say if you are 32 bit XP and 64 bit Windows 7
etc...that I suppose could also make a difference. Wish I had something more
definitive to help you but the steps above will at least be a good start
towards troubleshooting.

Seeing as how floppy drives are aging legacy devices with no current
practicality save for resurrecting old archives I would suggest that if you
cannot get it working under Windows 7 that you simply boot under XP and copy
all of your floppies to a more universal format and give the drive a nice
burial! You are going to find that the magnetic floppy media are
deteriorating anyway just like magnetic tape and your old discs are going to
become less reliable to the point of breaking down and becoming unreadable.
The time is now to preserve all those old memories and data onto a more
modern medium. One cheap 4 GB thumb drive I suspect will hold ALL of the
data on your old floppies unless you really have a ton of them.

 

[Charles Tomaras]

I haven't yet had a board that didn't have a floppy controller - I'm sure
they are there, but all of mine have them. Booting from a USB stick is not
as realiable as booting from a floppy - ie. booting from a floppy always
works. I have one board that won't boot from a USB stick if IDE0 is
connected. I have another that only works if the USB stick is in a certain
port. It's kinda like plug and pray...um...plug and play - it mostly works
but is still quirky.

I'm getting the idea that this is not a common problem - lucky me! I just
boot to XP to do the floppy writes I needed - I just needed to make some
partition magic boot disks. Boot to XP, run the PM floppy disk maker,
reboot back to Win7, end of story. Six months from now I'll try to write
something to a floppy disk and then remember, oh yeah, can't do that from
Win7...<gg>...

Why not write your Partition Magic boot discs to CD? I haven't used
Partition Magic in years but I use Acronis True Image and Disc Manager and
they can write boot discs to CD.....can't image that PM can't?

 

[Zootal]

Why not write your Partition Magic boot discs to CD? I haven't used

Partition Magic in years but I use Acronis True Image and Disc Manager
and they can write boot discs to CD.....can't image that PM can't?

I'm not sure - never tried. Partition Magic was bought by Symantec and
discontinued a while ago. I have Partition Commander, and it comes with ISOs
that I can burn to CD. The box I'm setting up doesn't have a CD player
anyhow, so it wouldn't help much.

 

[Zootal]

I'm running Win7 and my internal floppy drive (which I haven't used in
a couple of years) works fine.

1. Check in Device Manager under Floppy Disk Drives and verify that
it's showing up.

2. If it shows up in Device Manager select it and look under the
General tab to make sure it's listed as working properly.

3. If it's there but not working properly go to the Drivers tab and
make sure it's not disabled and also that it has a functioning driver.
(those choices will make sense when you get there)

Hopefully this will shine a light on the problem. Since you can use it
when booting under XP it seems to me that the motherboard recognizes
the hardware so it's got to be either somehow disabled or there is a
driver issue under Windows 7. You don't say if you are 32 bit XP and
64 bit Windows 7 etc...that I suppose could also make a difference.
Wish I had something more definitive to help you but the steps above
will at least be a good start towards troubleshooting.

Seeing as how floppy drives are aging legacy devices with no current
practicality save for resurrecting old archives I would suggest that
if you cannot get it working under Windows 7 that you simply boot
under XP and copy all of your floppies to a more universal format and
give the drive a nice burial! You are going to find that the
magnetic floppy media are deteriorating anyway just like magnetic tape
and your old discs are going to become less reliable to the point of
breaking down and becoming unreadable. The time is now to preserve all
those old memories and data onto a more modern medium. One cheap 4 GB
thumb drive I suspect will hold ALL of the data on your old floppies
unless you really have a ton of them.

It reads them fine, and device manager shows it as OK. It's 64 bit Win7. It
just won't write reliably. Meh...it's not a high priority to deal with

I actually off-loaded all of my floppies to CD years ago. And yeah, most of
my floppies are bad and won't take a format anymore. Every now and then I
need to boot a box with Partition Magic floppies, and the old ones I have
laying around are usually bad.

 

[JimBob]

I can read and write OK to a floppy, but did notice one small problem. The
quick format works fine but if it is unchecked the format takes about twenty
minutes to complete. Just for the hell of it tried a standby new drive and
data cable, but still get same problem. Prior to removing old drive
uninstalled drive and controller in device manager. When new drive put and
rebooted the drivers were reinstalled OK. I'm assuming the problem is
probably associated with the windows 7 drivers, but that's just a guess.
Anyway no big deal just thought I'd let you know this little tidbit.

 

[Conor]

Here is a bit of an off the wall problem. When running Win7, I can neither
format nor write to a disk in the floppy drive. Boot to XP, and it works
fine. Are there known issues with Windoes 7 writing to floppy drives?

Don't even bother trying to fix it. Go to a shop, buy a 1GB USB pen
drive for £1 and have something far more reliable with a far higher
capacity that runs quicker.

 

[Barking]

It reads them fine, and device manager shows it as OK. It's 64 bit
Win7. It just won't write reliably. Meh...it's not a high priority to
deal with

Is the floppy you're trying to write to write-protected?

-Jake

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

I haven't yet had a board that didn't have a floppy controller - I'm sure
they are there, but all of mine have them. Booting from a USB stick is not
as realiable as booting from a floppy - ie. booting from a floppy always
works. I have one board that won't boot from a USB stick if IDE0 is
connected. I have another that only works if the USB stick is in a certain
port. It's kinda like plug and pray...um...plug and play - it mostly works
but is still quirky.

I'm getting the idea that this is not a common problem - lucky me! I just
boot to XP to do the floppy writes I needed - I just needed to make some
partition magic boot disks. Boot to XP, run the PM floppy disk maker,
reboot back to Win7, end of story. Six months from now I'll try to write
something to a floppy disk and then remember, oh yeah, can't do that from
Win7...<gg>...

Sort of "are we having fun yet?".

Heck, just take Chrles Tomaras's suggestion, but use an external CD
drive (or use a cheap usb -> SATA on a loose drive).

 

[Lord Vetinari]

People still use those?

Just over a year ago, my USB floppy drive came in quite handy...I was at
Chambanacon, and someone needed to transfer a bit of data from someone
else's computer, so they could fix their iPhone (bad update problem). I ran
home and got it, and saved the day. When I bought it, I still used floppies
on occasion...that was an excellent $20 investment.