Disk drives

Many thanks for trying, Ray. I've had a look. It's set up correctly in there - listed as floppy drive, 1.44MB. I just don't understand why this has affected all 3 drives!

was the Zip drive on. How was it jumpered [master or slave]? Who is the mfr of the harddrive? Some use different jumpering if the drive is the only one on the cable and if there is a second drive on the same cable. Removing one could foul up that.

And, of course, you, one of humans, was inside the computer. We humans usually are found to be the cause of such problems at least 95% of the time, and in the physical area that we penetrated.[based on over 30 years of troubleshooting].

Check all your cables connections. If you already did that DO IT AGAIN. Two incidents in these forums in the last two weeks where the poster said they had checked everything. When they checked again the system booted up with zero problems.

Did you tell us what Op Sys you were using? If you have all of the drivers you might delete the ENUM key in the registry and reboot and let Windows find the hardware again. It won't find the Zip this time. Don't do this without further discussions.

OK, thanks, Ray. Point taken about checking and double-checking, then checking once again. Here is as much as I can tell you:
O/S Win 2K
I have changed no jumper settings at all.
I have changed no motherboard connections at all
My (physical) top drive is a DVD-ROM (Samsung DVD-ROM ST-616T). Next is my CD writer/reader (HL-DT-ST CD-RW 8400B). Both of these are on the same cable, alone, with no others, and both are jumpered on the first setting.
FD is on its own cable ? alone.
I have tried putting everything back the way it was, but that did not work. I?m at the stage now, that I wanted to be. DVD-ROM, CD writer/reader and FD all in, and no Zip drive.
(The Zip drive was on the same cable as the HD, and was jumpered as a slave)
I don?t think there is anything else I can tell you, except that:
The HD is 74.5GB, of which 19.8 GB is free. The details that I can make out are Maxtor 6L080J4 ? this is working absolutely fine.
The BIOS is reading the A: drive correctly.
I have tried leaving a disk in all 3 drives when rebooting. To add to the conundrum, this is what happens on startup, if I leave disks in the drives. The A: drive does not read at all. The DVD and the CD drives will do a listing (I can get at *.txt files on both, but I cannot play a CD/DVD). Now, if I remove the CD and the DVD disks that I left in on reboot, and put them back in, I get the error message I was talking about - The disk in drive ? is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? whenever I try to use any of them. So, it is now happening on all 3 drives.

Regards
squiggles

From the control panel, system, device manager. Check to be sure that the IDE channels are enabled. They may be recognized properly, but if not enabled in device manager, they will not work.

Best of Luck.