win 95/98 floppy damaged by win xp

[palkot]

I work in a computer lab on campus. All windows machines in here are Windows XP. From time to time, someone will come in with a floppy from home, Windows 98 (all campus machines are 2000 or XP) and when these computers try to read it, the disk is 'not formatted, do you want to format it now?'. Invariably, this process actually damages the disk. None of the techies here get it. I thought XP should be able to read back to 98, and if not, at least not damage the disk. What's going on?

[pave_spectre]

Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif forums.

When you say a floppy from windows 98 do you mean simply a floppy containing data that was saved with 98, or do you mean a win98 boot disk?

If the latter, I have seen XP not be able to read bootdisks including win98 boot disks and fail to format them but still destroying all data. Formatting in DOS fixes them.

If they are disks that are simply data saved in 98 do you know what sort of data they may have contained, and what programs were used to save them, since XP should still be able to recognise anything stored on such a disk since the floppy file system is still the same.

Does it occur on any specific machines or does it happen on a few.

[palkot]

It's a floppy, presumably formatted on 98, with an Office document or anything like that. One guy came in today with a Word doc.

This hasn't happened often enough to be able to tell if all the machines do it, or just a few. But the three specific problems I've had to deal with were all on different computers.

[pave_spectre]

Microsoft has an answer regarding this that relates to older pre-formatted floppy disks. Dont know that it will help.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;140060

[palkot]

Thank You! Exactly what I needed.