Floppy disks are almost a thing of the past and will soon be relegated to a computer museum in the near future. Still... some folks have hung on to their old machines that use diskettes and other sizes of floppy disks.

Knowing When Something is Wrong & What to Do

How do you know when something is wrong with your floppy disk drive and what are your options when it needs to be fixed?

Sometimes the first clue you may get is an error message regarding you're A-drive. The A-drive is the slot where you insert your floppy disk. If there is a problem with it, it's more than likely an issue with the disk itself.

The error message appears something like this:" The disk in drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" or "A:\ is not accessible

By their very nature, floppy disks can become corrupted fairly easily. They have ultimately been taken over by CD's, DVD, and flash drives.

If you aren't ready to purchase a new computer, here are some things you can do to fix your disk.

? Double check that it has been inserted correctly. You'd be surprised how often this can happen.

? Some disks are not allowed to be overwritten and a way to check that is to slide the tab on your disk to the position that blocks out light. Then try it again.

If you've arrived at this point and the disk still isn't working, try a couple of your other floppy disks to see if they work. If the other floppy disks are working fine, move on to the next step. Run a "scandisk' which is a task that comes with the older Windows operating systems.

? Locate scandisk in Windows 98 by going to your Start button->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Scandisk. Select Drive A.

? If you have Windows XP click on yourStart button-> My Computer-> Floppy Drive. Then right click on this. -> Select Properties ->Tools ->Error Checking. Now you have the option to choose the 'automatic fixing and recovery of file system errors and bad sectors.'

If you still can't use your disk then you can toss it in the bin or you might try to reformat it and hopefully you can still use it, but the data that was on it previously will be gone.

If you are running Windows XP, this is how you can reformat your disk.

? Go to yourStart button->My Computer->Floppy Drive. Right click on this: Select Format. It's best to do a complete format but you can choose the quick format if you wish.

Hopefully, you are now able to use your floppy disk. If not, it might be time to consider upgrading to a new computer complete with CD and DVD drives.

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