Floppy drive icon but no floppy drive

Fand

Yeah, I know it sounds like a song from the 80s. Anyway, the icon appears, but the computer can't read floppies, and denies vehemently that there are any in there.

a) Is the drive dead? If it were, surely it wouldn't be showing the icon? I've tried uninstalling it and letting Windows find it and reinstall it, with no luck.

b) Help!!!

I need to boot from the floppy to put back some damaged files <sigh>.

Praetorian

IMO, Your floppy is damaged or your operating system is not working properly. Try the following….

1) Check the connections from the floppy (data & power) to the motherboard.

2) Make sure your bios is set to boot to your floppy drive first. Then try and get yours hands on a bootable floppy and see if it works. (This will eliminate the chance that your OS is at fault)

3) If the floppy is working in dos then windows is just finding some sort of hard ware conflict. Check in control panel -> System -> Floppy disk controllers to see if there is a problem

By the way, windows always shows the floppy icon even when there is no floppy drive installed

beaver

If you've got a can of compressed air around, give the drive a blast of that. Check all your cables on both ends.

Is the drive powering on - are you getting it trying to read the disks - does the LED come on? If not, try another power lead. If that doesn't work the drive is most likely f00ked.

You can pick up a new drive for about a tenner...

By the way, to put back those files... why not boot from the CD?

-Ross

Fand

The house is crawling with floppy drives, no problem there. I'll try replacing it.

I tried copying the boot floppy onto a CD and using that, but I'm a bit confused about drives and OSes and things.

Symantec said to boot from the floppy and then type:

extract /a x:\win98\precopy1.cab wsock32.dll /L c:\windows\system

with "x" being my CD drive. So I booted from the CD, which seems to insist on thinking it's the a: drive - at least it boots to an a:> prompt. But a notice comes up telling me that my CD drive is F, which surprises me, because normally it's E.

Anyway, I tried "extract /a f:\winme...", because it's not win98 I'm running but WinME, but it didn't like that, gave a message saying "Invalid media type reading drive A; abort, retry, fail?"

Then I tried the same, but using "e" instead of "f", and got the same message. I tried changing directory to E and to F, but it spat those back at me too.

So I'm wondering should I be using the "e:\win98..." version - does WinME call its CAB files win98, for its own good and sufficient reasons?

<sigh>

What I want to do is just replace the damaged files, make sure I'm clean of viruses, and go back to ordinary work. Drat the thing.

Any helpful suggestions gratefully accepted.

Cerberus

are u sure that precopy1.cab is actually in the same place in the winme cd as in the win98 cd?

phaxx

Firstly lemme say that floppy drives have given me nothing but hassle for the last year or so - I've ditched them entirely and only work with them when absolutely necessary, when there really is no other option. If it can't go on my network, it isn't worth using :P

Now... windows does not show a floppy icon when there isn't a floppy drive installed. Maybe win95 did, can't remember.

Make sure the floppy and the floppy controller are enabled in the bios, and other than that, it's the fdd or the cable.

Seriously though, ditch them, nothing but pain. Ancient tech, has no place today.

Fand

Phaxx, how would you go about restoring the damaged files without a floppy, please?

po0k

The floppy drive should be connected to the small conector just after the twist.
make sure you have pin1 on the back hooked up to the wire with the red line on it.
I was fiddling about with tubularising my cables the last night. When putting it back I had the cables swapped around and no twist in the cable.
Windows showed an Icon in place of the normal floppy icon.
I was like the floppy drive with no actual floppy disk super-imposed over it. i'm using Win98SE.
The twist is done at pins 10 to 16.
so the first 9 wires are flat, the next 7 are reversed and the next 20 are flat again.
The twist is there to distinguish which drive is the master in a dual-floppy configuration. Ooooooh, when dual drive terminals ruled the land.....

Fand

Should the twist go at the board end or the drive end?

beaver

Drive end.

beaver

Originally posted by Fand
I tried copying the boot floppy onto a CD and using that, but I'm a bit confused about drives and OSes and things.

Nah, put your Windows CD in the drive, make your CD drive bootable in the BIOS and fire away...

with "x" being my CD drive. So I booted from the CD, which seems to insist on thinking it's the a: drive - at least it boots to an a:> prompt. But a notice comes up telling me that my CD drive is F, which surprises me, because normally it's E.

The A: is just a setup thing. The CD drive gets bumped up to F: because Windows Setup creates a RAMDISK (IIRC).

Anyway, I tried "extract /a f:\winme...", because it's not win98 I'm running but WinME, but it didn't like that, gave a message saying "Invalid media type reading drive A; abort, retry, fail?"

Then I tried the same, but using "e" instead of "f", and got the same message. I tried changing directory to E and to F, but it spat those back at me too.

You need to switch to a drive/directory with extract in it ('s path).

Why not just replace the drive if you've got spare ones knocking around. It'll take all of about 30 seconds.

Fand

I will replace the floppy and try a new one tonight.

BUT...

I think the floppy may not be working because the virus ate its driver.

The computer doesn't want to boot from the WinME CD. When I put that in, even if I tell the BIOS to boot from the CD, it ignores it, saying it can't find a boot record on the CD, and boots instead from the hard drive in Normal.

This morning I copied a boot floppy on to a CD on another machine, and started up using that, and pressing shift-f5 to insist.

I asked for "Command Prompt Only", and got an a:> prompt.

I'd checked on the WinME disk, and found that the path should be ...winx\precopy1...

So I typed:

"extract /a e:\winx\precopy1..." and so on, and smart as a whip my trusty PC came back with:

"Invalid media type reading Drive A; Abort, Retry, Fail?"

I aborted (after trying Retry and Fail), and it said:

"Invalid media type reading Drive A. Invalid Command.com. Enter correct name of Command Interpreter (eg Command.com)" and instead of an a:> or c:> prompt, got a prompt like this:

>>

Arrrrrggggghhhhhh.

What does all this mean? How can I tell my machine to mend itsbloodyself?

beaver

The program 'extract' is not on the A: drive or in your path, because that drive is blank. You'll need to change directory/drive to find the extract command. Once you're in the directory with the extract command, run it from there...

Fand

Beaver, sorry, I should have said I tried changing directory, but it just comes up with the

>>

prompt when I try.

phaxx

Oops sorry, didn't see the bit about trying to recover files using it.

Ah yes someone else mentioned it, booting from a cd.

If all else fails, put the hard disk into another machine and copy the required files across, if you have another one there.