I noticed this problem today when I tried to read a disk. In XP, I can't seem to access the floppy. I put in any disk, it tells me that the disk is not formatted. I try to format it, I get an error about how there was an I/O error unrecognized by the floppy driver (???). I've already tried swapping two drives and three cables. No change. But the weird part is: if I put in the emergency disk and boot up from it, it loads fine. So that rules out the floppy controller itself being bad. It has to be something w/ the drivers in XP itself. It also tried removing the floppy controller from Device Manager and rebooting. It found the drive again but still same problem. Are there any other drivers I could try? Any other ideas?

I got a suggestion that you may not like. Take the floppy drive out and take it outside and lay it in the driveway, then back your car over it several hundred times while asking yourself "Why was I still using a floppy drive!?" I don't see why anybody would have a floppy drive in a modern rig, hell I haven't used one in over 5 years or more, never had the need. You can do all the same stuff with much more room on USB pen drives or cdrw's, even flashing the BIOS to motherboards can be done safely in Windows now so there's no need for such ancient hardware to be in your pc.

Well, one was needed to load the RAID (F6) drivers when installing XP so it could see my array. Could I do that w/ the CD instead?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q140/0/60.asp&NoWebContent=1 I have the same issues.