win2000 floppy drivers not loading

[wvengineer]

I recently had to reinstall Windows 2000 Professional on my computer at work. Everything seemed to work fine. I installed Partition Magic 6.0 and partitioned by 13GB hard drive into two partitions. Upon completion of the Partition Magic generated reboot, floppy drive a: (3.5") and b: (5.25") were no longer available. They are not listed in My Computer or in Windows Explorer. In the hardware manager, the floppy controller has the yellow error code and says the driver is not installed for the floppy controller. No floppy drives are listed. When I perform a driver update and use the default Windows driver, the controller starts working, and the disk drives are now listed. But both drives have the yellow error code and say the driver is not installed. When I update the drivers for each floppy drive and use the default Windows driver, they start working. Both drives are listed in My Computer and in Windows Explorer and both work fine until the PC is restarted or rebooted, then the drives disappear again. I've tried uninstalling the contoller in safe mode and letting Windows find the drives during reboot. They are found and the drivers installed and things work OK until the PC is restarted or rebooted, then they are gone again.

Both drives are listed in the BIOS and listed during POST. Drive also works when booting to floppy. IRQ 6 is assigned to floppy drive, and no conflicts are listed in device manager.

I think the problem is in a registry setting. Anyone have any advice? Thanks!

[NooNoo]

Welcome to Windrivers wvengineer

Try disabling the 5.25 drive in bios... 2k can be funny about those. Uninstall the floppy controller and drives in windows. Then install the motherboard the drivers. Now scan for new hardware. When you get the 3.5 working ok, re enable the 5.25 and hopefully 2k will see it properly.

[wvengineer]

NooNoo

I tried what you suggested. After uninstalling the controller, a rescan did not find anything. So I rebooted. W2K found the 3.5 upon entering the device manager (not on its own during W2K loading). Drive accessible and working OK. I then performed another reboot, and lo and behold, same thing! No floppy drive. In device manager, it says that Windows cannot load the driver (code 31).

Any other ideas?

[NooNoo]

I know this is for a cdrom, but give it a go

[wvengineer]

NooNoo

I navigated to the registry key that was the equivalent for floppy drives. No Upperfilters or Lowerfilters keys were there to remove.

Thanks for the link though.

I checked the registry entries for my floppy drive class with those on three other W2K computers in our office and all have the same entries. So if it is in the registry it is somewhere else.

[NooNoo]

ok, repair console, fixboot and fixmbr

Since the bios is happy and windows isnt, I am wondering if partition magic did something screwey with the boot records.