Terrence,

    I also work at a community college in the IT department.  We run
into that problem with floppies about a year and half ago.  The problem
is floppies that have been pre-formatted, or formatted on a DOS base or
Win 95.  This problem is discussed in Microsoft KB article 140060.

    The basic problem is that the floppies do not have a media
descriptor in the boot sector of the floppy.  The media descriptor tells
the system what type of floppy it is.  

    The work around that we decided to do is provide a Windows 98 system
in a few labs.  The Windows 98 system could read the floppy and copy the
contents into a temporary folder, and then reformat the floppy, as Win
98 does put a media descriptor in the boot sector of the floppy. Then
copy their contents from the temp location back to the floppy.  Then Win
2k and XP could read the floppy.  We also now require the students to
format their floppies in a lab system that has either 2K or XP prior to
their first use.  


    I hope that this helps.


                Lonnie
     


 

-----Original Message-----
From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nolley, Terrence
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 12:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Format Floppy...


Hello everyone,

I work at the local community college in the IT department.  Recently
we've been bombarded with Instructors stating that students are
complaining about being prompted to format diskettes (that were working
fine previously).  Some students have even mentioned that while trying
to access a known good diskette that they receive the message "diskette
is currently in the MAC format".  We only have various versions of Dell
computers on our campus running Windows 2000/XP.  Any help would be
gladly appreciated.

Terrence

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml