Unusual floppy drive problem (not a cabling issue)

sbshah

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Oct 21, 2003
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I just put together my new computer and am having an unusual problem with my new Samsung floppy drive. If I make a floppy disk read-only (by flipping the notch on it) and then access it through Windows Explorer, the drive does not stop reading the disk (the light remains on and the grating sound is continuous). The only way I can stop this is by placing focus somewhere else in Windows Explorer, say the C: drive. After about 10 seconds later it finally stops reading the floppy.

Does anybody know what is going on here?

Some notes:

1. OS is Windows XP Professional SP1 OEM

2. Cabling is hooked up correctly (the twisted end of the cable is connected to the drive, with pin 1 to the left as seen from the back of the drive).

3. If I insert a writeable floppy into the drive, the above behavior does NOT happen! That is, the drive makes a momentary grating noise, the light comes on, contents are displayed and then the access sound and light goes off.

4. Accessing either a read-only or writeable floppy through the Command Prompt works correctly!

5. Tests were done with 3 different floppy disks that were known to be "good" virus-free disks tested on another PC.

6. I don't think a virus could be involved since this is a newly-built PC.

It looks like either the floppy drive is bad or an incompatibility exists between the OS/Windows Explorer and this brand of floppy drive. What do you guys think?

Thanks for the input!
Sanjay
 

RobD

Champion
It's a good one, I'll give you that! Can you get another Floppy drive from a friend or work to try? That way, you'll know for sure whether it's the drive or something to with your O/S and subsequent loaded software. You say it's a newly built machine, how far into the software loading process have you got, or got to before you noticed this problem?

I have seen a motherboard do something similar whereby it won't read disk in Windows, but works a treat in DOS.

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sbshah

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Oct 21, 2003
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I'll try a few floppy disks from another source. Come to think of it, let me also try to format a disk on the drive and save some information on it and then see if the drive continues to behave in the same way.

I built the PC and installed the OS completely about 4-5 days ago. The installation went very smoothly with no problems at all. I didn't need to use the floppy disk. It was only when I needed to look up some information on an old floppy did I discover the problem.

Sanjay
 

pIII_Man

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Mar 19, 2003
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sounds driver related, i doubt samsung bothers writing floppy drivers, but it is worth a check at samsungs webpage to see if they do.




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