Help,

I was cleaning up my office checking to see if the floppy disks I had stored. Had any good data on them for a book I am writing. Well anyway I put the disk in the drive and the light came on but then the computer froze. So I rebooted took out the disk and tried another disk when a message came up that the disk needed to be formatted. Immediately I tried another that knew had worked in the drive before this happen the same thing happen. So I went into msdos typed a:\ and a message: Not ready reading drive A: Abort Retry Fail. I aborted and a message: Current drive is no loner valid came up. How do I get my floppy drive back?

Thank you for your time,

Wayne

That's the normal response DOS gives you when it can't read a drive and you use the "Abort" option.

If you can find one, try a floppy cleaner, it could just be dirty. I think it's more likely the drive is dead. New floppy drives should be under $20 and are fairly easy to install.

Also, try a few other floppy disks before deciding it's a goner, the disks can go bad and cause weird problems too.

A loose ribbon cable is likely going to generate similar problems...

Yep, loose or bad cable, either one can cause problems. Don't know why I didn't think of that before, it's usually the first thing I swap out when I get one that's acting flaky...guess maybe I need to finish my coffee next time... :D