it can't read tracks from another Floppy drive.Alignment is also a common cause of the dreaded unable to format or track 1 bad errors.
Try using the SAME floppy drive that you use for creating the boot diskettes (just move it into the Gateway).
I am sure you have already double checked the little things like data cable on properly and floppy attached to end connector with twist in cabling.
Also make sure that there isn't an option in the BIOS to "swap floppy drives".
I'm working on a Gateway P5-200 System that won't boot up. It's supposedly got W95 installed on a 2GB drive, but I don't know which version.
When I put in a floppy bootdisk for either version 95A or 95B, I was getting a 'not a valid system disk' error and assumed for a while that it was referring to the boot disk since when I checked in the bios, it was set to boot to the floppy drive first.
However, after creating new bootdisks at my XP computer (using downloaded bootdisks from www.bootdisk.de ), I was getting the same error message. I took the bootdisks back to my XP computer and tried to read the floppy disks, and was immediately told that they had to be formatted again, and when I said OK...XP would then tell me that formatting couldn't be done to the disks.
Threw out six after: swapping floppy drives with a known good one, changing the cable, disconnecting the harddrive, and disabling the cdrom boot option, after it finally dawned on me that the NEW error I was getting was 'put bootable media into the appropriate drive'.
I had been suspecting the Monkey virus since it will affect floppy drives but even if it is, I should be able to get to an A:> prompt without a harddrive, and it's going nowhere....although the floppy drive IS recognized by the bios as it's booting up.
And SOMETHING is trashing every floppy disk I use no matter whether it's the original floppy drive or one I swap to.
Has anybody got any clues? I removed the motherboard battery to reset the CMOS and even reset the bios manually back to defaults and still nothing. Would a bad floppy controller on the motherboard do this? I've never had one go bad before so if what I've described are the symptoms, I sure wouldn't have known or suspected it until now. Also...if it IS the floppy controller gone south, can I use an old ISA IDE card with a floppy controller on it to get around this? The motherboard has two ISA slots available in addition to the PCI and AGP slots so that might be an option for me.
TONI

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