a question about floppy drives (!!)

[lazarus]

Okay, a couple of questions.

1. I've downloaded a few old, old games. The install requires me to put them on a floppy (Lemming, in particular). Is there another way around this?

2. My old floppy had died, so when I rebuilt my PC I didn't include one. I just bought a standard floppy from Fry's, and installed it.

The green read light is on. When I go into the System Manager, it tells me the floppy is running fine, as is the controller. (Driver's a bit old, 2001, but I haven't found a new one. This is the driver that came with XP.)

But when I put a disc in and browse to the A drive, it tells me to insert a disk. It just won't see one.

Any ideas?

(I may just give up and get one of those flashes if I can use that for the games.)

[bemildred]

1. You're probably stuck with the floppy with Lemmings.

Unless you feel like hacking up the binary, cause it likes
to read the floppy for copy-protection.

Have you tried putting in a scratch floppy and formatting it?

[lazarus]

2. yup

just tells me to insert a floppy. I'm wondering if I got a bad drive.

[bemildred]

3. Doubt that.

So, in My Computer, you right click the floppy icon,
then select "format", and it says insert a floppy when
there is already one in there?

[lazarus]

4. yup

No disc in drive a. please insert, blah blah blah.

OTOH, I can still hear it spinning, trying to read the disc.

[bemildred]

5. Sounds like hardware.

Could be the cable or it's orientation, although that usually
turns the computer into a lifeless brick until you fix it, or
the cable connecter you are plugged into.

Since it spins, you have power.

Could be the device itself, as you say.

Could be the floppy you are inserting.

If we had some spare parts, we could do some fault isolation.
But I expect you have one of everything.

---

I would:

Make very very sure I have the cable connections right.
Make sure I have a good floppy disk.
If that does not help, take it back and get another.

[lazarus]

6. okay, thanks!

I'll do some checking a bit later, i appreciate it.

[bemildred]

7. You might want to look over your BIOS settings

and see what the device manager has to say about the floppy too.

It's embarassing to go get a new one find it still doesn't work.

Good luck.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

8. If your floppy light stays on at all times, it means

your ribbon cable is on backwards. Just turn it so the red stripe on the edge of the cable faces the opposite way.

For reasons of industry-wide laziness, they never bothered to key the floppy ribbon cables so it can't be put in backwards. Now that they are proclaiming the floppy to be dead technology, nobody will ever bother correcting this.

[tkmorris]

9. Good point

However, it can also mean a bad disk. I have a box full of several year old, poorly treated disks and about half of them do this when inserted. They are just corrupted.

There is another way to do this however. It involves creating a "virtual" floppy drive. I run a great number of my games using a virtual drive from Daemon Tools. It saves wear and tear on the CD, though I don't know that it will work with a floppy image, which is what the original poster has. A quick google turns up this program: http://www.download.com/Floppy-Image-Creator/3000-2248_4-10395269.html , which does handle floppy images, though I note that it is shareware. There are a ton of others however, googling "virtual floppy drive" will turn up plenty.

[Ready4Change]

10. Further

It's possible your floppy is connected as B: rather than A:. I had one machine whose BIOS got a bit confused until I corrected that.

Two ways to correct. First is via the cable. Most floppy cables can connect 2 drives, 1 is A:, the other is B. Swap those connectors.

Second, many BIOS setups allow you to switch the A: and B: connections via software. That's what I did to solve my problem.

There's a solution out there. Keep plugging away at it.

[TroubleMan]

11. Don't need a drive....just mount a virtual floppy drive

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html


http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/Floppy-Image-Creator/3000-2248_2-10395269.html


Basically it's just a program to fool your software into thinking it has a floppy drive. The you mount the image file to the drive and it's just like you have a real floppy there with a real disk in it....except it'll be faster.