Solution towards floppy disk access problems

Some computer cases have metal front plates which must be bent/removed so that one may install floppy disk drive. When one bends the metal front plate, make sure the metal front plate is bent far enough so that it CANNOT contact the floppy disk's drive.
More specifically, if one takes a look at the bottom of floppy disk drive, one may notice a circular disk which must be able to spin freely in order for the floppy disk drive to function. Now, will with some computer cases, there may be a considerable distance between the case's metal front plate and the "true front" of the computer case.
When this is true, and if the computer's "metal front plate" is not bend far enough, the metal front plate may contact the "drive" located at the bottom of the floppy disk drive, stopping it from spinning. As a result, one cannot boot to floppy, and, when one boots to Windows and places a floppy disk in the floppy disk drive, the floppy disk drive access lite stays lit and Windows Explorer prompts one to insert a floppy disk; both of which give the impression that the floppy disk drive is not functioning.
And depending upon tempuratures, etc., this may occur sometimes, but not others. And installing a new floppy disk drive, using new ribbon cable, etc. may, or may not, help; that is, except in the instance when installing new one should "happen" to bend the front metal plate a bit more than previously. But if only slightly, the problem may return again with time.
So, if one has an issue reading floppy disks, make sure any metal front plates are bent far out of the way.
Regards,
stevestechresource

I second that pterhune
I would say that this article describes handling of cheap cases as Q-tec, I know there are others as well, but some of Q-tec's cases have really cheap metal. It bends if you look hard at it

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after writing an html report on a floppy disk and removing it, labview shows an error message window: disk not present.
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Attachments:
prova.vi ‏55 KB

Hi,
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Attachments:
salva_testo1.vi ‏22 KB

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<table border="0" align="center" width="90%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SmallText"><b>rogerisland wrote on Fri, 03 June 2005 11:25</b></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">
>That is, you can boot Solaris from the install CD (or DVD) together >with
>HP's driver from the ITU floppy in the USB floppy drive, and copy >Solaris to
>the raid array. And after that, the Solaris installer tries to mount the >ITU floppy
>(to copy the raid array driver from the floppy to the raid array), but >fails
>because no PS/2 floppy device /dev/diskette is present?
Basically, yes (and I want to install Solaris 10 on x86)
</td></tr></table>
OK, Solaris 10 should have less issues with USB floppy support than
older Solaris 9 or Solaris 8 releases.
<table border="0" align="center" width="90%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SmallText"><b>Quote:</b></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">
I have to use the console installation (without the GUI) because the interactive one hangs at the end of the disk.
</td></tr></table>
Yep, that's a known bug in the Solaris 10 x86 GUI installer. It didn't
exist in Solaris 9 x86 and older.
When the GUI installer is in use, the final step of installing the extra
driver from the ITU floppy prompts for something on /dev/console,
but with the S10 installer GUI running there's no way to type
/dev/console input.
<table border="0" align="center" width="90%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SmallText"><b>Quote:</b></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">
Another problem is that the installer tries to copy the driver to the array before disc 1 is finished (after it installed all the files though) where no reboot is attempted.
I'd like to try your suggestion though.
Is it possible to fire up a shell if I use option 3 on the installer (console install in GUI) or interactive shell (option 1) (if it wouldnt hang..but maybe it hangs BECAUSE it tries to access the disk) ?
</td></tr></table>
If the GUI installer is running, right click on the desktop and open a
"Terminal" window, to get a shell.
If you run the "ptree" command when the installation has stopped after
copying the packages from CD1 to the HDD, you should notice the
following processes:
<div class="pre"><pre> 2678 /usr/sbin/install.d/pfinstall -f /swap2 -s /dev/dsk/n 9335 sh -c /sbin/sh /tmp/diskette_rc.d/icdinst9.sh 9336 /sbin/sh /tmp/diskette_rc.d/icdinst9.sh 9345 sh /tmp/diskette_rc.d/inst9.sh 9348 sh /tmp/diskette_rc.d/inst9.sh</pre></div>
The last one ("inst9.sh", PID 9348 in my case), is blocked in a read()
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installer.
Before you kill inst9.sh, manually mount the ITU floppy from the USB
floppy drive and install the raid drivers manually.
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raid array drivers from the USB floppy). At the "select type of installation"
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Hi!
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Recently, my mac freezes whenever I insert a floppy disk. I reinstalled the OS thinking that it might solve the problem.
I need solutions for this problem badly since I am working on my thesis. Thanks in advance

nydge,
Welcome to the Discussions.
You may not have the File Exchange Control Panel properly setup, but I would head over to the MacOS 9 Discussions for some expert advice.
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=669

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I suddenly am not able to use my floppy drive anymore. Granted, I seldom ever use it, but I wanted to just back up some small files, and inserted a disk into my external floppy drive, and I'm no longer allowed to write to a floppy disk. I have the little slider button in the unlocked position, and I was always able to write to a floppy with my old OS, Tiger. Now I have a new iMac computer with the most update version of Snow Leopard, and I cannot write to a floppy disk anymore. Does anyone else still have one of these, to tell me what is going on with it? Did Apple just discontinue support at all for floppy disks? I can still insert the disk and read what is on it, and even copy it to my desktop, but I cannot write to the disk. I've tried several different ones, and they all tell me the same thing. Under Info and Permissions, it says that I am only able to read the disk, and it won't let me change it at all. I guess if this is not possible anymore, I can just toss this device, but it pains me, because I'd still like to be able to use it. Thanks for any information you can provide.
Kristy

Hi Kristy
It sounds as though you have solved your problem but I have found a way to fully access floppy disks formatted as Mac OS Standard. This may not work for all though because I have access to a Windows 7 PC.
On my mid-2011 iMac running OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion) I was trying to download and copy onto floppy disks (for an old Macintosh) some software downloaded from the internet.
I found, as you did, that I could read such disks via a USB floppy disk drive, but that I could not write to them.
Thanks to your post I realised that it was simply because such formats have only limited support in more recent versions of OS X.
There is software called MacDisk for Windows. I just ran it in Windows 7 running as my Bootcamp partition accessed via VMWare Fusion. The software is free to test (with some limitations).
I just successfully copied a file via it to a disk and then was able to read it on my iMac.
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if anyone ever has this issue ....
it must have been EXTREME fragmentation. I bought another 2TB external disk, connected it to the TC, did a complete archive, which took around 24 hours... then i wiped the TC and put stuff back... it now works fine again...

Solution towards floppy disk access problems

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