3 1/2 floppy disk problem

A likely possibility is a failed floppy drive. Have you tried to "remove" the floppy drive in Device Manager? If not, give thast a shot, then reboot. The 'puter will "rediscover" the floppy, and reload its drivers. If there was a driver problem, that might fix it. On the other hand, floppy drives, particularly older ones and those allowed to sit idle a long time, are notorious for failing. Fortunately, they're cheap (under $25, mostly) and easy to install (a couiple screws and a "fits only one way" cable connector are all that's involved - even at a shop, it should be a low, fixed-price, while-you-wait installation), and in general require no special software; standard floppy drivers are built in to Windows. Another avenue might be to try an external USB floppy drive; those are cheap too, and are pretty much "Plug-and-Play". Mostly, when it comes to 'puter hardware and peripherals anymore, or even electronics in general, the standard is pretty much "If it don't work, replace it". If a "by the keyboard" reinstall doesn't do it for you, get a new one would be my call.

My first guess would be that you're using a bad floppy disk rather than a bad floppy drive, though the latter is certainly a possibility given that floppy drives are more likely to fail within a couple years than most other parts of your PC.

But go out & buy a brand new floppy disk & see if it works with that. Don't use one that you know worked before for this test--use a new one.

Floppy disks fail all the time...e.g. a tiny bit of dust inside can be enough to make them useless.

Another minor point: When installing a standard internal desktop floppy drive, contrary to what Timber said above it is possible to fit the mini floppy power cable on backwards, even though the correct orientation is indicated. You don't wanna do that, as plugging power cables in backwards (usually an impossible task with normal molex power connectors that plug into CD & hard drives, etc) is enough to fry devices & sometimes your motherboard as well. As for the 34-pin floppy ribbon cable, if you plug that in backwards it won't break anything, it just won't work, and you can just reverse it. If you get a USB floppy drive you won't have to worry about openning the PC case in the first place.

I think I paid less than $50 bucks for my external floppy drive.

Gaaack!!!! My bad ... Monger's right; I stand corrected. The floppy connector can be installed backwards/upside down, but it should be well marked as to which way is which, and the instruction sheet (which, of course, I've never even glanced at untill just now ) accompanying the new drive should make this very clear. Sorry for any confusion.

No confusion. I'm reading and pondering, but not planning to tackle this until the weekend.

During problems with computer over the weekend, I ran the three restore CDs. Apparently, this cured my floppy problem. It recognized an old file on a used disk and also produced a new file on the disk, after which I closed the program and removed the disk, then restarted and opened it up again.

BTW, I saw a 3.5" external floppy drive for sale at $29.95 at Fry's Electronics last week.

I agree with most that's been said, however:

From my personal experience, using 10-15$ floppy drives (NEC or similar), I have NEVER experienced a floppy drive fail! I repeat: NEVER!
I have many failed floppy disks (about 100).

I have burned about 5 hard drives, 2 motherboards (+1 that died on me while uploading new BIOS), 2 CD-ROMS, 1 DVD drive, couple of mouses (mechanical), one keyboard, one monitor (repaired 2 times), one power supply, couple of modems. I also had problems with TV tuner card. I had problems with RAM, new and used. I had problems with bad network cards (10M).

The only devices that never failed for me are:
- VGA card
- sound blaster (I have always used only SB)
- CD burner (I only had 1 so far)
- intel microprocessors
- floppy drive (3 1/2 " or 5 1/2 ")

Now experiences may vary, but in our company we also burn a lot of HDD's, some CD drives fail, CD burners fail, RAM fails, monitors fail .. but I don't know of any floppy failures.

OTOH, they are used very rarely these days and maybe that's the reason..

Relative

if memory serves, there was a time (back in the dark ages) when 3.5" floppies were purchased unformatted, and you had to format them one at a time before use...

Relative, thanks for mentioning VGA card -- had totally 4gotten about those suckers!

Yes, of course if you rarely use them they're unlikely to fail. Another issue is how well you take care of them -- many people stick dusty or damaged floppies in them, or attach sticky notes, paperclips, etc.