My laptop computer's bios is permanently set at a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. However, Windows Millenium is now showing the drive as a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk, and naturally I cannot get the drive to read the 3 1/2 inch floppy. The laptop just freezes everytime I try to access the floppy drive. I have tried deleting the drive, going into the bios, the registry, etc. Nothing seems to work. It would appear that I have picked up a computer virus since the problem occured just after a session on the internet. I cannot find anything about the problem on google, yahoo, lycos, etc. Can anybody help regarding sorting the problem &/ getting rid of what I assume is a virus? Thanks.

By deleting the drive, do you mean going into Control Panel, System, Device Manager, Disk Drives and selecting the "GENERIC NEC FLOPPY DISK" and selecting Remove? In BIOS Setup you should be able to select it as a 3 1/2 inch drive. After doing that, see if you can locate the PnP/PCI Configuration section of CMOS Setup and Enable the Reset Configuration Data or ESCD to clear the DMI data for plug and play. It is also possible that the diskette drive is defective and causing windows to see it as a 5 1/4 drive. You might try booting with a startup diskette and see what DOS thinks about it.