5 1/4 Floppy Drive in Win2K??

[TechIr1shm1ike]

I am trying to get a 5 1/4 Floppy drive to work in Win2K. Everytime I try to open a disk either in My Computer or in Dos, I get a The Request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. Any ideas?

[NooNoo]

does it identify it correctly in my computer?

Is the bios enabled?

What type of 5.25 disk you using?

5.25" Single Side - 160KB
5.25" Double Side - 360KB
5.25" Double Side High Density - 1.2MB


It may be your drive does not support the format or the media.

[Pinnacle]

I do not have an answer to your question, however, I am currious why you want to do this. Is 5.25" media even still available?

[TechIr1shm1ike]

I know I know it sounds crazy! Lady where I work has a program and a machine running win95 with a 5 1/4 drive. Xerox has a program on her machine that uses the 5 1/4 drive and thats it. They won't change it either. It must use these disks. I am going to swap her computer out and I was trying to make it a Win2K computer and give it a little upgrade. I want to know if it is possible. I keep getting the same error, either in Dos or in My Computer. The disk is good and I am pretty sure the drive is good. There must be something just not configured right. THe cables are ok...Bios is setup. Appreciate any ideas. Anyone got a driver maybe?

[Darkstar]

Is the 95 machine networked? Why not copy the files from the big floppy to a network share?

[melee5]

Since I do use a 5 1/4" drive regularly I thought I should chime in. I use win98se so can't really speak to win2k problems knowledgably but I believe I still have some things to contribute.

First Windows doesn't support 160k or 180k formats because they both are single sided formats and single sided formats have only one FAT table - no matter what you may have heard to the contrary. I have a sector editor and I can prove it. That fact really doesn't matter at all because _Windows_ believes that _all_ disks have two FATs and will therefore trash any 160k or 180k disk that it tries to write to. Right on top of the directory too - which is where the 2nd FAT would be if only those formats had a 2nd FAT. But one can read from those disks just fine in Windows.

Even using 360k format, Windows still has some troubles, in particular with a new un-formatted disk or a disk that has a bad track 0 or any other non-standard (360k/1.2meg) format already in place. You will have to drop down to true DOS mode and do a format there to get around this particular problem. But once that is done, Windows will do a proper re-format and good reads and writes from that point on. To me, this sounds like the troubles you are experiancing - use only known to be good formatted disks by doing them yourself.

Trying to format a 'troublesome' 360k disk in Windows results in Windows Explorer [Not Responding] in Ctrl+Alt+Delete box. Likewise, a DOS box format fails with 'troublesome' 360k disks too. There you get, 'format failed, do another?' after several minutes of waiting.

Keeping the above in mind for win98se, I would think 5 1/4" drive work in win2k would be hard if not impossible. But I wouldn't give up till I tried it with a few good known to be formatted properly disks first. Perhaps it's the disks that are giving you your troubles and not neccessarily win2k floppy drivers. The drivers appear to be HSFlop.pdr and Ios.vxd on my machine. Best of luck.

PS - yes the media is still available - its a DOD requirement in fact.

format b: /u /f:360 or
format b: /u /f:1200

[TechIr1shm1ike]

Well, first off I wanted to say I appreciate all the responses to this question. I love coming to these forums because they are awesome and always get answers. After playing around with it all day Friday till I actually became sick and had to leave for the day I got it to work.....I think. I tried about 5 disks, and all of them ask me to format them, regardless of information already on the disk or not. After I format the disks, however, I can then use them, place files on the disk, delete files, it works great. I tried using it with the Xerox program, and it seemed to work partially, up to a point where it seemed the program was having problems and not the drive. So I think I have it working, I am going to keep my fingers crossed.

As for Xerox, they said that most of their machines use the 5 1/4 disks, and they are in the process of upgrading but didn't have a time-line till when that would be accomplished.

Thanks for the help

[NooNoo]

In my experience if a drive insists that all disks put in it require formatting and you do format them, the disks will then no longer work in any other 5.25 drive. The heads may well be misaligned.

[Archangel42069]

PS - yes the media is still available - its a DOD requirement in fact.

format b: /u /f:360 or
format b: /u /f:1200 [/B]

Can you show me the order? I haven't even seen a single 5 1/4 in any IT shop since I've been in (3 1/2 years)...I have seen the drives, but they were on machines on their way to DRMO. I know the media are available, but I don't think the DOD has it in very wide use anymore - perhaps with green gear, but the Dells and Compaqs we use on a daily basis stopped including the 5 1/4 drive...what, a decade ago?

[Radical Dreamer]

I've even seen the media at places like Wal*Mart

[geoscomp]

Hey..we've got new drives, head cleaners, and media here..the Minnesota Dept. of Natural Resources still uses them. Once these run out, we can't find a source for new drives though. There are a number of what would be considered in the mainstream to be obsolete technologies that are still in use by government for one reason or another..the FBI still uses 486 laptops for example, ..and Medicare uses bulletin boards rather then websites..Have you checked with Xerox to find out if the program itself is supported on W2k?

[kcullen]

Have you checked the Microsoft HCL for this?