My floppy drive and controllers are fine, I can boot to a floppy disk, I can read and write to floppy when booting to a boot disk. I cna not read a floppy disk when in ME, says there is no disk please insert one, I have run across this before, and formated and fdisk to fix, does any one know of any other fix? An yes I have checked for virus, none found.

I was wondering if you had an ALI motherboard. ALI boards have had a few problems concerning floppy drives. If you do have an ALI MB then flash your BIOS with the lates revision. Fallen Angel

If you boot into safe mode can you use your floppy drive? To do this: Reboot. After the POST (the memory check and the *beep*) start tapping the F8 key. Choose #3 safe mode. Now...try your floppy. Does it work?

I updated BIOS first thing when I found problem, it did not affect it. I booted to Safe Mode and yes, I can read a floppy fine. When trying to access floppy also in non-safe mode, the mouse will lock up, but there are no IRQ conflicts. thanks for any an all ideas...

I have checked the registry to see what all is loading, have remarked anything out I thought may casue a problem, but nothing seems to help in that area. I installed Nortons and ran a scan on system for a virus, no virus was found... System will also boot to a floppy just fine with no problem, have replaced drive. Rest of system seems to be ok, I just can not use floppy drive to do anything.

If you can read the floppy in safe mode... then something running in the background on your computer is causing this. You're going to have to do a little troubleshooting to figure it out. To start: Go to start>>run>>msconfig. Choose selective start up. Take the checkmark out of everything underneath. Click apply>>ok>>reboot when prompted. When you get back up it will look like safe mode because you are not using your video driver from the system.ini. There shouldn't be any icons down by the clock. If there are, manually turn the programs off. Check your ability to use the floppy. If you can... move on to the next step. If you can't... post back... there is either a driver that doesn't load in safe mode that is causing the problem... or any rogue programs that turned themselves back on upon bootup. Post back. If you can use your floppy on a clean boot... Go back to msconfig. Under selective startup, put a check mark in system.ini. Click apply>>ok>>reboot. Check the floppy. Can you use it. If not... you've got a driver problem. Probably not the floppy driver per se... but one of the others. Post back with the contents of your system.ini and I will try to take a look. No promises... just a look. If you can... Go back to msconfig. Put a check in win.ini. Click apply>>ok>>reboot. Check the floppy. No? Take a look at the win.ini file. Look under the windows section for any rogue entries in the load= or run= lines. Post them here. If it works... Go back to msconfig. Put a checkmark in Static VxD's. Click appy>>ok>>reboot. Does the floppy work? No? Go back to msconfig. Go to the Static VxD's tab. Take the check out of all. Check them up one at a time, rebooting after each check and testing the floppy. Figure out which item is causing this. Post it here. If the floppy works... Go back to msconfig. Put a check in Environment varibles. Click apply>>ok>>reboot. Floppy work?? No? You have a legacy device driver or program that has loaded itself into the autoexec.bat or config.sys file that is causing this. Go back to msconfig and take a look a the Enviroment tab. What's there? I believe there should be 4 entries. Post what you have there here. If it works... Some thing in the startup group is causing this. These are programs that start upon boot and are always running. My first suspect is that Norton antivirus you keep touting. It is most likely set to scan floppies and protect them and it is causing this mess... but since I don't know everything you are running on this box, you will need to do some linear troubleshooting to be sure. Go back to msconfig. Go to the startup tab. Put a checkmark in the first five items. Use a pen and paper(or notepad) to write down what you have checked as the items in the startup category tend to rearrange themselves. Click apply>>ok>>reboot. Check your floppy. If it doesn't work... the culprit is in that group of five. You just need to narrow it down some more. If it does work go back to msconfig and check five more items. Continue in this vein until you figure out what is causing the problem. Remove the offending program or if it is the Norton, set it not to scan floppies in it's options. Good luck!

Will not access floppy drive still....aaahhhh After unchecking everything under selective startup, it still hangs up the mouse and does not access the floppy drive. Will hang up for approx 45 seconds and then box pops up saying please insert a floppy into drive A: As for the Norton Anti virus, I just installed it to check for a virus, to see if that was the problem, this machine was having this problem before Nortons AV was installed. Just trying to cover any possibilites, including a virus. Thanks for your help newgrl, for some reason I forget about msconfig an how useful it really is. I made sure nothing else was loading needlesly in start up and have remarked out everything I can find in registry and anywhere else I can find.