Floppy acces in W2K recently lost

[FritzyMan]

Floppy access recently stopped. A: is not seen in My computer, Explorer etc. But Standard floppy is seen in My computer. It states it is working properly, and is enabled.

Other info: I/O is 03F7-03F7, IRQ = 6, DMA = 2, No conflicts, is enabled. Doing an 'uninstall' does so, reappears upon a Restart. But no actual access. Have not done any registry tweaks or cleaning, no tweaks of any kind.

Also tried to uninstall, restart, then the Device Manager shows it reinstalled but still no A: is seen. The troubleshooting button has been used several times, no fix was found.

No recent W2K or OFC2K updates have been done. Only known new thing is an HP1200 printer. External USB 2.0 HDD was added, it works flakey-file copies are 'not completed' and runs very slow (may be related, may not be?).

However the floppy does work OK using boot disks. A par port driver also worked, connecting the HDD that had a par port cable on it (could not get a USB DOS driver to work). BTW the HDD is a Kanguru kit with my own HDD in it, this unit has cables for par port, USB, firewire. So, all floppy use is OK in DOS, but not within Windows?

[KHT]

1) Do you have a ZIP drive that may be configured wrong? It can be detected as a floppy and screw things up.

2) Try changing the floppy drive cable and make sure the floppy is connected to the end with the twist. (assuming you only have one floppy, who in their right mind would actually have a b:\ drive?)

[andyms18a]

can you uninstall the usb hdd and the softwair for it and see if the flopy drive works

[FritzyMan]

Wow, good ideas.

No, there is no zip drive. Only the USB ext HDD, only when I connect it, which is not very often, even less after I noticed it was not reliable (?). As I understand it, the USB 2.0 is built into W2K (at least after I did some update to the Intel mobo long ago).

The USB driver, DUSE 4.4, was only an attempt when booting a DOS floppy, so it never has been part of the W2K environment.

BTW, the C: HDD is on a removable tray obtained at the local PC store where I got the custom made PC. Another tray with just a DOS partition was put in, and A: is OK. Since it works fine in HDD DOS or floppy DOS, it seems that the floppy cable should be OK (not on B? But it will be easier to open up the PC and check, than reinstalling all the OS/OFC etc, thanks for that idea.

[KHT]

Yes, the external USB drive should be detected by W2k\XP automatically. I use an external USB flash drive all the time and it has no affect on the A:\drive at all.

Since you don`t have a ZIP drive and assuming the cable is connected properly, I would try replacing the cable with a known good one and if that doesn`t work try yanking the floppy itself and trying it in another machine if you have access.