floppy disc problem

Sounds like a defective disk and the floppy drive is having trouble reading the boot sector on it. Is it a brand new or old disk?

It's most likely one of the following issues..

Your disk has developed problems
It's formatted for a Macintosh (or other OS)
It's formatted at a capacity your hardware doesn't support
It really is unformatted

If there's no problem with other disks well then it isn't a problem with the floppy drive -- definitely an issue with the floppy itself. Floppies go bad all the time, unfortunately.

Thanks each, Monger when you say floppies "go bad" all the time, can you be more specific?

There be a heaps of causes, but to test out some common ones try this little experiment.. Get a brand new floppy, pull back the little flap thingy at the top, and sprinkle a bit of dust inside. Next, get a magnet and use it to hold up a 2nd floppy against a metal desk. Pass a 3rd diskette around to all your friends (almost certainly someone will have a damaged or dirty drive).

You'll have 3 bad floppies.

It also won't work if the tab on the window (3 1/2 diskette), but I don't recall if that produces the same error message.

The actual drives go bad all the time as well. Alignment is another thing that causes that message. The disk might actually work on another drive.

Floppy drives (and power supplies) are the most commonly failing pieces of hardware....and yeah good point about alignment causing some disks to be readable & others not. Check the floppy on another drive before tossing it out.

And floppy drives are cheap. You can get one from wal mart for $10. Or get a bit spiffier and buy a USB external Floppy drive for $50 or so.

I have a lot of problems doing school work at home because of a bad floppy drive. I don't use floppies any more, I use ZIP Disks. Bought a 100mb external USB ZIP drive, and take it with me. Almost everyone has a USB port I can plug into, and since I take the drive with me I don't have to worry about that.

Sigh. . .hope the 750mb disks come down soon. I'd like to get one of those.

How about using a 1gig USB flash memory stick instead ?
Yeah, that was 1 gigabyte !! Amazing huh ?
http://www.usbdiscount.com/jmtek1gbflas.html