one bad floppy:

[debm]

I had this problem with an old floppy. Managed to get most of the information from the disk by right clicking on the A drive in explorer and selecting copy disk, I had to persevere it didn't work first time, told me couldn't read source disk a few times, kept pressing retry, eventually I managed to copy the contents to another floppy and only one file was unreadable - maybe I was just lucky :)

[ErnieK]

I have noticed in the past that Xp (practically since XP was released) will throw up this message but when the "bad" floppy is then put into a Win98 computer it reads and writes OK.

[PrntRhd]

debm,
We appreciate the enthusiasm, but you replied to an old thread from 2001?

[ErnieK]

:o And I followed up on it! :o

[Paul Komski]

Have split this part into a new thread.

debm The heading you used doesnt match your workaround. If the floppy wouldn't read and gave a notice about needing to be formatted (even if that was not true) you should not have been able to copy files from it. However if one can remove as many files as possible from a corrupt floppy it is sometimes worth running recovery software (such as GetDataBack for FAT) on the media or trying scandisk once all "good" files have been removed from it.

ErnieK I too and many others have seen the same problem with non-access by WinXP. I believe this to be due to the media descriptor byte which is not always present on pre-formatted floppies. Such floppies are problematic for all the NT-based OSes. The workaround/cure is to full format them using a dos-based OS. Full formatting with WinXP is supposed to work (but often doesnt in my experience) though using WinXP to format and create an MSDOS start up disk has been the most successful.

The media descriptor byte (at offset 15h and the start of each FAT) is a different promblem from straightforward floppy corruption which happens all too easily. Also bear in mind that floppy drives themselves can be fickle and I have seen new floppy drives that only detect some floppies where an older drive in the same system recognises them all. Go figure.