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General discussion

Floppy drive fails to identify NO DISK in the drive

by marka Nov 9, 2004 9:36PM PST

My new Dell Dem 4600 (Windows XP) has a problem.

It only occurs with there is NO DISK in the drive and there is a reason to access the drive.

When this combination occurs, the drive heads hammer for about 15 seconds, a window opens with a message that "The disk isn't formatted, do you want to format it now?". When I click "NO" the heads hammer for 3 or 4 seconds and stop. When there is a floppy in the drive, everything behaves properly.

To make it even more frustrating, after a reboot the first access to the empty floppy drive happens as expected without the hammering and returns a normal message of "no disk in drive".

Any ideas? Dell support's proposed solution is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS and all other software. I am not ready to do that yet. As a workaround, I am keeping a floppy disk in the drive except during start up.

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2 Posts

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Re: Floppy drive fails to identify NO DISK in the drive

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 9, 2004 9:56PM PST

Or you configure your Explorer to hide the floppy. TWEAKUI does that.

Or you configure your Antivirus to stop scanning the floppy. It does this constant looking to see if a boot virus has found a way there. I consider such a major threat and don't consider fixing it to be valid but IT IS YOUR CHOICE ON THE MATTER!

Best of luck,

Bob

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Re: Floppy drive fails to identify NO DISK in the drive

by Steven Haninger Nov 9, 2004 10:18PM PST

You may have something running in the background that wants a floppy disk to be available. Can you check what is running on your system. It might even be an "mru" (most recently used) issue. Can you recall deliberately using the drive recently? It could also be a malicious program so run the appropriate utils to rule this out. Out of curiosity, when you leave a disk in the drive and it is accessed, is anything written to it?

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