I'm resurrecting this thread because I've about had it! I need help.

My scanner problem is solved, but that's about it. I'm really starting to think that my updating to Windows XP Home was a bad move. It's as if my computer keeps reprogramming itself—negatively. As if it's eating itself from the inside out. Awhile back, I posted the specs above, so I won't repeat anything but the relevant info here.

I have two floppy disk drives. One is an LS-120 SuperDisk drive. It's like a Zip drive, but it's more versatile in that it can read from and write to both 120 MB SuperDisks or any standard 3.5", 1.44 MB floppy (or ever the old 720 KB disks). Superior technology to the Zip drives, but swamped in the marketplace, like VHS swamped Beta. I also have a standard floppy drive. Everything worked fine under Windows 98. It's just that Windows 98 crashed and/or froze about three or four times a day.

Windows XP doesn't seem to crash. But it has other problems. New ones emerge every few days.

First, with the SuperDisk drive. Whenever I try to access it, the computer tells me either that there is no disk in the drive or that the disk is not formatted and it asks if I want to format it (which I don't, because it has files on it). If I remove the disk and reinsert it, it will eventually recognize it, but I usually have to do this three or four times. Then, it lets me read from the disk, but it won't let me save anything to it. It tells me that the disk is write protected or damaged, which it is not.

Okay, that's pain in the ass enough. But about a week ago, my regular floppy drive seems to have stopped working. It refuses to acknowledge the presence of a disk in the drive. When I insert a disk, the little LED comes on and sometimes the drive grinds away for a few seconds then stops and all seems perfectly normal. Other times, it will just keep on grinding and eventually return an error message saying that the drive is not ready or that there is no disk in the drive. If it acts normally and I try to access the disk with My Computer, Windows Explorer, or any other program, such as trying to load a .doc file into Word, it grinds away some more, sometimes for a couple of minutes, then it returns any one of several error messages, usually "a:\ is not accessible. No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk." It doesn't matter which floppy disk I use—new, old, formatted or unformatted, blank or with files on it—none of them will work.

The result is that I have no way of backing anything up on floppies. I do have the CD-RW drive, so that, right now, is my only backup option. I understand that Windows XP lets you use a CD-RW as if it were a floppy, but I've never done this other than to make a fairly wholesale backup of my document files (which needs to be updated). For everyday stuff, I've been using floppies, keeping the working files for my book manuscript and other writings on SuperDisks, and more temporary stuff like my notes, new drafts, and such on regular floppies, transferring it to SuperDisks when it starts shaping up. The Windows XP "Troubleshooter" says there's nothing wrong. The floppy drive is working just fine. Well, not so's you'd notice. This is getting really irritating!

On top of this, I have a Dell Inspiron notebook computer that I use when I'm away from my desktop (such as sitting cross-legged on the bed, or off someplace else). The Dell has a changeable drive bay for which I have an LS-120 drive and a CD-ROM drive. I can't, of course, use them at the same time. I have to shut the Dell off, remove one drive from the bay, put the other in, then turn it back on. Where I used to switch SuperDisks or regular floppies freely back and forth between the two machines, now getting a file from one computer to the other is a real problem. No way to get a file from the desktop to the Dell other than to save it on a CD-RW disk, copy the file onto the Dell's hard disk, work on the file, save it to the Dell's hard drive, then shuffle drives, copy what I do on the Dell from the hard drive to a SuperDisk, and hope the desktop will decide to read it. A bit of a Rube Goldberg operation.   

Since I had Windows XP installed, I have not made any changes to my system, nor done anything else that I can think of to cause these problems.

Reading the posts in a computer forum I googled my way into shows me that the floppy drive problem I'm having is not unusual with Windows ME, NT, 2000, and XP, and the Microsoft tech support articles offer zilch. One fellow suggested reformatting any hinky floppy with "Full format." I tried to do this, but when the format screen eventually showed up (after a string of error messages), it appears that this advice is useless. In the dialog screen, the "Capacity" box tells me (accurately) that the disk is 3.5", 1.44MB, 512 bytes/sector. The "File system" box offers FAT. "Allocation unit size" box says Default allocation size, and the Volume label box is blank. The "Format options" panel offers three options: Quick Format, Enable Compression, and Create an MS-DOS startup disk. No Full format option. So much for that.

Another fellow said that he had tried reinstalling the driver for his floppy drive, but that didn't change anything. The problem was still there.

What the hell is going on!???

The malfunctioning floppy drives are my main concern, but it has another little irritant: if I leave the computer for awhile, the monitor ("Energy Star" compliant) shuts off to save electricity, as it's supposed to do. Before I had the computer upgraded and had Windows XP installed, all I had to do to activate the monitor was press a key, any key on the keyboard. Now, nine times out of ten, it won't respond to that. I have to hit the reset button and go through the whole damned start cycle again.

I paid for all this stuff. I could lug it back to the shop, but at $60.00/hr for labor, that could get pricy, and I'm pretty sure these are all software problems. I think I have a right to expect the thing to work! If it were not for all the money I recently put into it, I think I'd bite the bullet, toss it off a pier, and buy a Mac.

Anybody got any ideas? I'm getting desperate!

Don Firth