Floppy drive

[speedrat]

Background

Built a new box with a new floppy drive. I have loaded XP and Server 2003 and with both installs and I had to use an old floppy drive to load RAID drivers since 2 new floppy drives (one rma'd since I thought it was bad) did not work. Cable was correctly installed since light on drives went out at proper time and light would show an attempted read of disk on both occasions.

Question

My question is more of a curiosity since I used the old floppy to install drivers. My understanding of floppy drives is that there aren't any differences to speak of in many years. They are 1.44 drives made by Mitsumi and Sony. What made one old Mitsumi read the disk, but the new Sonys don't? FYI the floppy that I used is a few years old but still a standard 1.44

 

[Y2K SE]

The read/write heads in the older drive may have slightly come out of alignment. This is fairly common and would result in floppy diskettes that work fine in that drive but show as unformatted in another drive. Usually, you can reformat the diskette in the new drive and continue using it.

 

[leSLIe]

what the heck is floppy ?

 

[Lyquist]

Floppies are still useful for some things...like booting old machines with no CD-ROM drives and stuff like that. I really don't like having one, but I have my own computer business and occasionally I will need a floppy for something...and they are pretty cheap anyway.