Broke my floppy drive?

[rlbailey]

Hey ya'll
I have a laptop thats getting kinda old but I still love it.
I was transferring a mass of files via floppy drive from one computer (8 ye old) to the other a few months ago, and the floppy drive slowly stopped working. It progressively took all, then only some, then rejected all floppy disks. You put a disk in and it tells you its not formatted right, asks if you want to format it. Or it asks you to insert a floppy disk when you click on the drive.

Anyways, I've come to accept the fact that my drive is dead, but was wondering if there was anything I could do about it.

Under the device manager, it says there are no device conflicts and that the drive is working properly.

Any ideas?

[dparm]

The mechanisms are probably worn out/wearing out.

You really should move away from floppies...terribly unreliable (as you can see).

[jharriso]

Unless you can find a replacement drive for your laptop, and you wanna stick with floppies, you're going to need to grab an external USB drive, like so: http://www.unityelectronics.com/product-product_id/2463

[waltersp]

or... if both computers have network cards, plug them into a router (http://www.buy.com/prod/D_Link_4_Port_Cable_DSL_Router_DI_604/q/loc/33410/10326027.html) or get a crossover cable (http://www.buy.com/prod/Belkin_Crossover_Cable_RJ_45_male_RJ_45_male_7_ft_ CAT_5/q/loc/101/10218694.html).

[rlbailey]

Hahah.
They should SO make USB drivers for windows98 (the one before 98SE). I don't get why they don't.

[picch]

Hahah.
They should SO make USB drivers for windows98 (the one before 98SE). I don't get why they don't.

USB was extremely new (like really new) when 98se was still being used. Right about the time USB started to become popular and more widely supported, Windows 2000 was being released. So that would be the reason for a lack of driver support.

[dcv]

Hahah.
They should SO make USB drivers for windows98 (the one before 98SE). I don't get why they don't.

USB drivers in general, or just for this particular external USB Floppy drive?

I had an older IBM Aptiva with 2 USB ports, and it ran Win98 first edition (still does, actually, but I haven't turned it on in a while). Back then, the only USB device I had was my external CD-RW (4x4x6 - WhoO!), but over this last summer I was shocked to find that the manufacturer of my USB thumb drive had Win98FE drivers available on their website, and I was able to use my USB thumb drive to transfer files from that old computer (sure beats the floppies I was planning on using!).

I remember some USB drivers were also written for Windows 95, but most device manufacturers would only support Win98 and up at the software level, making USB on Win95 kind of pointless.

[dparm]

My advice is to yank the hard drive, plug it into a cheap external case, and plug that case into the other computer.

[rlbailey]

Ahah, so they do make drivers for 98FE.
I purchased both a Sony Microvault 128Mb , and SanDisk Cruzer 256Mb. Neither of them had drivers for 98SE available, so I assumed that nobody made them.
Dane, what kind of USB drive do you have, so I can go hunt one down?

[bgwinkel]

Generic Drivers for 98

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php