You might want to check the BIOS on the laptop and
make sure the floppy drive is correctly identified as
a 3.5 inch floppy drive.

I also have a laptop with a 3.5 inch floppy drive.
But, at one point, the BIOS/CMOS settings were insisting
it was a 5 1/4 (1.2 MB) floppy drive. After I corrected
the CMOS settings, the floppy drive worked fine.

If that is not the problem, you might just have a defective
floppy drive (or a loose connector inside the laptop).

Steven Walley


At 11:12 AM 12/29/98 +0500, you wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>A friend of mine recently accquired an old Toshiba J-3100GT laptop with
>640kb of RAM and a small hard disk (210MB, I think). It has only DOS 5.0.
>No Windows.
>
>The problem is that if a file is copied into a floppy disk, it cannot be
>read by other machines. The message "Disk in Drive A is not formatted.
>Format it now?" appears. All the machines we have can read 720k and 1.44MB
>disks, but not the floppies of the laptop.
>
>I formated a disk (1.44) as a 720k using the format switches from the
>laptop but the other machines still do not recognize it. When I tried it
>vise versa, the laptop would not recognize it.
>
>While formating a floppy disk from the laptop a message like "checking
>existing format 1.2 M" appears could this have something to do with it? In
>that case why can't modern day floppy drives access a 1.2 MB drive?.
>
>I tried many format switches but was not successful. BTW, the laptop has an
>internal floppy drive. It cannot be removed. I tried cleaning the head
>using a floppy disk cleaner to no avail.
>
>Would appreciate any help. TIA,
>
>
>Altaf
>
>
>[log in to unmask]
>
>
>Altaf Hussein
>Colombo
>Sri Lanka
>
>

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