For some reason my floppy drive has suddenly gone ga ga. windows recognises the drive is present and will attemp to read an empty drive but if i shove a disk in and either try to read or write any info, window freezes and i have to turn power off. The drive is quite new, disks are new etc.

Any ideas.

Try booting with a bootdisk. If the drive works OK in DOS then it's a windows problem. Post back with your results.

Dan
Thanks for the advice, i tried using the drive in dos and had no problems subsequently i have totally re booted my system, unfortunately i still have the same problems and can only assume the drive is faulty in some way.
Thanks again
Dave

Go into Device Manager and remove the floppy controller and the floppy drive, then restart the system. Does the problem persist?

Thanks for the help Dan but am still getting nowhere, have tried drive on another pc and its fine, replaced data cable, i can only now assume its a motherboard fault.
Thanks again
Dave

You could be right but it seems as though the motherboard's floppy drive controller is working OK as you had it working OK in DOS.

Any other suggestions anyone?

dave71, do you have the chipset drivers for your motherboard that you can reload?

Hello DJNafey - Im saying the drive works in dos, unfortunately i dont have a boot up disc so couldnt really test thoroughly. I'll create one at work tomorrow and try that.
Dan - i have my motherboard utility disc if that has what i need, i'll have a go. I've got round the problem for now using a usb floppy drive but it would be nice to put my finger on the problem.
Cheers Y' all

If the drive works in dos but not windows, then it's a windows problem as opposed to hardware related. In the windows environment, hardware works best with the proper drivers. If the drivers for your motherboard are on that utility disk then try reloading them to see if this rectifies the problem. This problem happens a lot in windows and this is one of the solutions.

For a boot disk, if you're on a 98(SE) machine you can make one through Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Startup Disk tab. Or if you have the 98(SE) cd, go to; tools\mtsutil\fat32ebd and run fat32ebd.exe.

i think im getting out of my depth with the mother board drivers, so i'l give up for now and just use my usb floppy drive, ps could not create a start up disk cos of original problem with drive not working its a viscious circle.
Thanks again for your advice
people like you save people like me a lot of stress.