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cannot open floppy disk

Hello
I recently formated and saved some data on a floppy disk,on a pc running Win 2000 pro, when I wanted to open the floppy on my pc running Win XP pro it would not open an hung for some time and gave the following message : A:/ is not accessible. No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk.
what could be the problem ?
thanks
JB

nobus

possible : bad floppy, incompatible floppies (one out of alignment)
can you still read the floppy on the drive you wrote it?
Bad floppy cable.

SOLUTION

miglid

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

capricornious

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improveyourpc

Josben,

Here is a link that explains exactly what you are referring to:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;130627

Did you quick format the disk or use a full format?

nobus

You can read floppies on ALL systems since they use ALL fat12 format

capricornious

Its not the File allocation table that is causing the problem,

kiranghag

>>No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk

ID marks relate to extra data written in each sector of floppy disk. this helps in the controller to locate block of data correctly on the disk.
these id marks are created during the complete format of the disk. if you perform quick format, these ids may not be recreated and you may have a disk with some bad sectors on it.

or if the disk develops bad sectors, these marks fade and render disk unusable,

now the bad news here for you is that the data u saved on the disk may not be accessible.

windows nt/2000/xp are very sensitive to disk reading, try to read this floppy in a windows95/98 or pure dos machine and u MAY be able to get some of the contents...

huntersvcs

You might not know it, but you can also run chkdsk on your floppy. Right-click on A in windows explorer, select properties, then advanced. You can also run chkdsk from there.

nobus

This is a wrong answer

kiranghag

yeh...he hasnt confirmed what exactly worked out for him

Josben

ASKER

Formating in WinXp machine and saving in 2000 and win ME and opening back in XP worked out. :-)
Thanks to you all

nobus

Still, it is not correct, as all OS'es have the same format for floppies, as i stated above, you could format it on the other system also. The only reason can be incompatibilities betwwen the two drives.

Josben

ASKER

Hi again,
You may be right, I am not an computer expert or techie,and I don't understand how it worked for me, this computer stuff stumped me from day one.
They say that computers are wonderful machines until they don't work. :-(
JB

huntersvcs

Floppy disk drives sometimes have a problem with calibration, meaning that during the formatting process the sectors are either offset or start in the wrong place. During the WRITE process, the FDD will adjust to the free space locations without any problems. Since the FAT Table identification is identical to all OS's you could have formatted on any other OS and it would have worked - because you were using a different FDD.

nobus

thanks hunter, exactly what i stated !

huntersvcs

You're right nobus! Don't know why the FDDs act up like that sometimes. I had one that would only read files on a disk that it had formatted itself.

nobus

I had lots of troubles with floppies, hence my knowledge about them !