[OPLINTECH] Floppy disk problems

[Ed Liddle]

as mentioned below, by installing the 3 mode floppy disk driver in
windows XP patrons can read floppy disks that were formatted and wrote
to using an earlier version of windows(windows 98, ME, 95, etc). What we
were experiencing is that a disk that worked fine in multiple older
machines running windows 2000 would not be able to be read using new
machines running windows XP. XP would tell you the disk needed to be
formatted. Of course if you format the disk in XP it erases it. When we
had public stations running windows 2000, we would tell a patron to use
one of those machines to read their disks they wrote using their windows
98 PC at home. 

Since Windows XP does not have a 3 mode floppy disk driver, if the
computer manufacturer put in an OEM 3 mode floppy disk drive in the PC
and used the default windows XP driver for the floppy disk drive, it
technically would not be the correct driver for the hardware device.

I can install a video card in a PC and if windows can not find the
correct driver it will use a generic one that will work. This usually
effects the screen resolution and color depth. The Graphics card *Works*
with the generic driver. If I open a high resolution image or a graphics
that uses 32 bits of color it doesn't look right, but I can tell
something is there and its blue or red or green, etc..  I get a much
better picture by installing the correct driver for the graphics card
much like a 3 mode floppy disk drive reads disks much better using a 3
mode floppy disk driver. 

Floppy disk drives do fail, the alignment can get out of wack. If its an
alignment problem then the disk drive that is badly aligned would only
be able to read disks that it wrote. The disks written by the poorly
aligned disk drive would not be able to be read in a properly aligned
disk drive. When a floppy disk can be read in 5 + different computers
running windows 2000 but can't be read in a computer running windows XP,
but the XP machine can write to a floppy disk that can be read by the
other XP machines as well as a windows 2000 machine that indicates to me
that all the floppy disk drives are properly aligned and the problem
lies someplace in the windows XP operating system. 
To verify this I also swapped floppy disk drives from a windows XP
machine to a windows 2000 machine. The same disk drive that could not
read the disk using windows xp could read the disk using windows 2000.
That indicated the drive must be working correctly.

I do agree that floppy drives aren't the best way to store information.
That is why the we decided to to purchase new PC's without floppy drives
to replace the windows 2000 computers used for public Internet stations.
We did purchase 1 usb floppy drive so if need be, it can be easily
connected to a computer for a patron to use. Out of the 12 public
internet stations by reference, 4 have floppy drives. We also have 4
teen computers with floppy drives as well. Hopefully by the time they
get replaced our patrons will have their own usb storage device they can
use, or bring a blank cdr to use to save their files to since they all
have cd burners.

-Ed Liddle 

On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 15:19 -0400, Aaron Bedra wrote:
> I would like to chime in here and throw a little information as to why these
> things really take place...
> 
> http://www.accurite.com/FloppyPrimer.html
> 
> This link will explain the mechanics behind floppy drive misalignments and
> the real reason that problems with floppy disks occur.
> 
> As much as we would all like to believe that M$ is responsible for a
> backwards compatibility problem, there is no real "driver patch" that will
> fix this issue.  The issue is that mechanical failure of the drives can and
> will cause these problems to surface.  We deal with this problem all the
> time and chose to sell the flash drives at our tech center and explain to
> our patrons the real reasons why floppy drives are no longer a good idea.
> 
> One thing to really keep in mind here is to get out of the mindset that
> floppy drives are still useful.  People will implicitly trust their "highly
> valuable data" to a device that costs less than $1 to manufacture and a
> medium that costs around $.01 to create.  The end result is that you get
> what you pay for, and we as the responsible parties for gathering
> information should pass that information along to those in search of it and
> explain why there is no better time than now to switch over to a much less
> volatile form of information storage.
> 
> My last point "I promise" is that this 3mode patch really only applies to
> lo-density floppy disks (ie 720k and 1.2MB) and these disks just don't have
> support built into XP for them.  That driver really only covers the ability
> to format the disks.
> 
> So to answer the original question...
> 
> The above referenced article is really why there are problems with using
> multiple floppy disk drives to create and modify information.
> 
> 
> Aaron J. Bedra
> Westerville Public Library
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 7/27/06 2:16 PM, "Ed Liddle" <eliddle at marysvillelib.org> wrote:
> 
> > This may shed some light on why some floppy disks work and some don't
> > seem to work with windows XP.
> > http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q309623
> > 
> > "Some 3mode FD drivers may be installed on PCs with Windows XP by OEMs,
> > although Microsoft does not provide the end-user support for 3mode
> > drivers. Please contact your OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) if
> > you have any questions on 3mode drivers."
> > 
> > http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics/browse_thread
> > /thread/20c270c1e99f11c/d9d55e04ec64e5ef?lnk=st&q=floppy+disk+reading+xp+pro&r
> > num=9&hl=en#d9d55e04ec64e5ef
> > 
> > Link I found on google groups about floppy drive problems and windows
> > xp 
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------
> > This worked out for me.
> > Summary:
> > Download the driver from:
> > 
> > http://downloads.viaarena.com/WinXPE/Oct02/XPe_3mflp132_v10.zip
> > 
> > And here are the steps necessary to install it (make sure there isn't a
> > floppydisk in the drive!):
> > 
> > 1.   Download driver.
> > 2.   Unzip the driver.
> > 3.   Open Windows XP's Device Manager.
> > 4.   Expand the "Floppy disk controllers" heading.
> > 5.   Double-click the listing for "Standard floppy disk controller".
> > 6.   Click the "Driver" tab and click the "Update Driver" button.
> > 7.   Select the "Install from a list or specific location" button.
> > 8.   Click the "Next" button.
> > 9.   Select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install."
> > 10.  Click the "Next" button.
> > 11.  Click the "Have Disk" button and then the "Browse" button.
> > 12.  Browse to where you extracted the files.
> > 13.  Double click the"VIA3MFPY.INF" file.  Then, click the "OK" button.
> > 14.  "VIA 3-mode floppy controller" is now highlighted in the drivers
> > list.
> > 15.  Click the "Next" button to begin the driver files copy.  Click
> > Finish.
> > 16.  Expand the "Floppy disk drives" heading, and repeat the above
> > steps.
> > 17.  Once the driver is updated for your floppy drive, reboot your
> > machine.
> > 18.  Now you can read floppies created with earlier versions of
> > Windows!!!
> > 
> > 
> > Hope this helps
> 
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