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Floppy drive problems, read before troubleshooting

 
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Joined: 03 Oct 2012
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PostPosted: Sat May 24, 2014 11:37 pm    Post subject: Floppy drive problems, read before troubleshooting Reply with quote

Ok so this has been something going on for quite some time now. Ever since the release of Windows XP a lot of people have had trouble running games on their old backup device from floppies. This should shed some light on things:

"
Floppy Disk is Not Accessible, Not Formatted, or Not Recognized by Windows:
Symptoms: When you access a floppy disk, you may receive one of the following error
messages: "A:\ is not accessible.", "The device is not ready." -or- "Disk is not formatted. The disk in drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" -or- "STOP: The disk media is not recognized, it may not be formatted." The same disk may work correctly with MS-DOS or Windows 95, or after you re-format the disk with Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003. This problem occurs on disks that do not contain a media descriptor byte in the BIOS parameter block (BPB) of the boot sector. Some older preformatted floppy disks do not contain a media descriptor byte. Older product disks may also not have the media descriptor byte. The media descriptor indicates the type of medium currently in a drive. With MS-DOS and Windows 95, you do not have to set the media descriptor byte. Therefore this problem does not occur with these older operating systems. The media descriptor byte is located in the BPB of the boot sector at offset 21 (15h) and in the first byte of each FAT on the disk. See Microsoft Article ID: 140060 for media descriptor byte values and use of a disk editor to change such.
"

As you can see, Windows 98 and Windows XP had compatibility problems between eachother for reading floppies. Now I know that no copier has Windows XP built in but what I am getting at here is that this paragraph above that I grabbed off of another web site states what was changed in Windows XP. Some byte at offset 21h and each first byte of each FAT on the disk is marked in Windows XP which is more than likely the primary reason why the games don't work on some copiers, specifically the Super Wildcard DX circa. 1994-1996

So in other words, don't junk your floppy based copier or take it apart just because of this issue. Try MS-DOS first and see if that alleviates the issue. I don't mean "command line" within newer Windows operating systems, I mean actual MS-DOS 5, 6.xx, 7 (7 shipped with Windows 95, 98, 98se, and Windows Millenium Edition) Windows XP and above do not have MS-DOS in them at all.

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