Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit - Floppy drive driver issue

I have been running Windows 7 build 7100 since it was released to the
public to try out. It has been running without problems, so I bought,
and installed the just released final version. However, I have found
that I can't format floppy disks, with the newly installed OS.

At first I thought that my floppy drive had gone bad, but after having
replaced the drive, with a drive from my second PC, and another drive
that I have in stock :-) as well as a new cable, I have come to the
conclusion that the problem is related to the OS.

In order to try to find the reason for the issue, I did a clean
installation of both WinXP64 and Vista x64. The problem didn't occur
when those OS'es were installed.

I even did a clean install of build 7100, to see if the problem was
there when I had that version installed. I found that the issue was
there too, but that I apparently hadn't noticed it :-)

I know that floppy disks aren't used much these days, but I find a
bootable diskette useful if I want to make a Ghost image, flash a Bios,
or disks for adding "F6 drivers" when/if I install WinXP64 or Vista etc.

I would like to know if the issue is related to my system only, AMD
"Dragon" platform :-) or it's a common problem.

My system:

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

Processor AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H
RAM 2x2048 MB DDR2 SDRAM 1066 MHz OCZ
GFX Club 3D Radeon PCI-E HD4870 Extreme OC 1GB
Hard-Disk WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS
Sony Floppy drive 1.44MB
PSU Thermaltake Toughpower 750W

I have Win-7 Enterprise x64 and Professional x64 running without a
floppy drives installed so for testing I had to use a USB floppy. Both
systems are RTM not beta and format floppies without problems. One thing
that I noticed that when formatting a floppy there was about a 15-20 delay
from the format request and getting the format window, possibly caused by
the USB floppy drive. What you may try is go into Device Manager delete the
floppy controller and click delete files, reboot the system to reinstall the
controller. Or another possibility is a stunt that I've done inadvertently
when installing the floppy drive is reverse the cable so that pin 1 isn't
aligned on the MB & floppy drive, but you said that the drive works on
different operating systems so that shouldn't be the problem. Have a great
day.

You are not alone.
I started having issues with floppy drives ever since I switched to AMD
motherboards. First a 790FX one and now a 770.
Couldn't figure out the root cause and I also swapped drives and cables.
I finally gave up and removed the floppy drive for good.
All I use now is an MS-DOS USB pen drive that comes in handy for BIOS
flashing and putting "F6" drivers.
Please note that neither Vista nor Win 7 need floppies any more for the F6
thing.

My PC is running W7 Ultimate 64-bit (OEM). The motherboard has an
Intel X58 chipset and there is a Sony floppy drive attached to the board's
34-pin connector that works as it should. You might have a driver/chipset
issue. Pretty tricky one, that.

Oh lordy lordy! My ample collection of 3.5" 1.44MB useable diskettes has
whittled away over the years to a mere two useable diskettes. Floppy rot.
They all die from it sooner or later.

Good question. I have not used a floppy in years, I wonder if Win7 supports
it too. Have you tried formatting it in XP mode?

I've done both quick formats and a full format on a floppy using Windows 7 Prof
64-bit doing a "custom install" after running Windows XP Prof (32 bit). I note
that there is a floppy disk driver in the system that seems to have been
produced by Microsoft.

and you made sure things are setup / working correctly in BIOS?

sometimes floppy settings are disabled or get reset ..

also if this is USB floppy a) enable legacy mode in bios and b) sometimes
eject / re-insert the floppy will make a difference.

B is important if you have the Virtual XP stuff installed.

As your system, based on a different chipset, with a similar floppy
drive connected to the onboard crtl. works, I think the issue is related
to the combination of my AMD chipset (RS780D with integrated Radeon HD
3300 graphics which I have disabled) and the Windows 7 64bit OS.

I have had clean installations of both WinXP64 and Vista64 running,
where the floppy drive worked without issues.

The first thing I do, after having installed, and activated, a new OS,
is to make a Ghost image of the clean installation, and save the image
for future use. It wasn't much trouble to restore the images, in order
to test for the problem.

I probably wouldn't ever have discovered the problem, if it wasn't for
the fact that I downloaded a new BIOS version for my second PC, from my
running Window 7 machine, and copied the BIOS to a floppy diskette.

I thought that everything was fine, until I had flashed the BIOS,
rebooted the computer, and got a hair raising msg. about a corrupted
BIOS, when the machine woke up :-) I am still surprised that it didn't
die totally :-)

My collection is on the loft. When I go, the inheritors can throw it out
:-)

Thanks for taking the time to test for the issue, and thanks to the rest
of you who replied to my msg.

I agree, as my Intel X48-based system is also able to read and format
floppies (well, once I'd got past the dodgy one that will now be thrown
away. 10 floppies left and counting. (3 MS_DOS 6.22 & 6 Win 3.11 disks & 1
freshly formatted)

I don't think there is a problem with Win 7 and floppy drives but the
default setting in Win 7 for drives without media to not be displayed.

I have an AMD 770. With Win 7 default settings neither an A: drive is
displayed nor and E: drive, my optical drive. When you insert a floppy
Win 7 doesn't scan it and show A: drive, but if you "Open" the computer
it's shown under removable drives and the A: drive can be opened from
there. I have no problem reading, writing, or formatting the floppy then.

You can change the setting in Windows Explorer to display all drives if
you so desire.

You didn't say HOW you are trying to format a floppy in Win7.

I haven't actually formatted one recently, but the process in Win7 Ultimate
is the same as in Vista: Start | Computer | Right-click on Drive A: |
Select Format from the menu. The last choice on the Format menu is still,
"Create an MS-DOS startup disk".

Is Home Premium different?

I am not blaming neither AMD nor Win 7 for my floppy drive woes.

I was just describing my issue which had many intersections with LDJ's one.
Finally, I did what physicians do when they can't fix something in your
body: extracted the bad part and not replaced it with anything.
Have a nice day.

The formatting process is the same for Windows 7 Home Premium, as it was
for build 7100 which is the Win7 ultimate version AFAIK. Formatting a
floppy disk from the desktop, or formatting it from an elevated CMD
prompt, ends with errors.

It's not a formatting problem only. It's not possible to write to an
already formatted diskette, without getting CRC errors.

I have tried to boot to a failsafe cmd prompt, and tested formatting
from there, with no luck. I guess it's the same drivers that are being
used. Formatting a floppy disk from Virtual PC 2007 running an OS/2 Warp
4 machine doesn't work neither :-)

I have booted into DOS, from a bootable memomrystick, and there
formatted a floppy disk without problems, just to make sure that my HW
still works.

If Microsoft doesn't release a fix, I'll use the drive for booting
Ghost, when/if I want to make/restore a Ghost image. I can disable the
drive in device manager when I am running Windows 7.

OK. I just formatted a 3.5" floppy - and it went perfectly. ;<)

First, I had Windows Explorer show me the contents of Drive A:. Then I
shuffled in a couple of other diskettes until I found one that did not have
contents I didn't mind losing. Then, still in Windows Explorer, I
right-clicked on Drive A: (in the left-hand pane, the Navigation Pane -
click Organize | Layout if you are not sure what I'm talking about), then
clicked Format and chose to Create an MS-DOS startup disk, then clicked
Start. I didn't time it, but it took a couple of minutes. Then I checked
the contents and saw the expected MS-DOS files. No, I haven't actually
tried to boot from that floppy - haven't booted from any floppy in years -
but I'm confident that it would.

Then I Saved THIS thread to Drive A:, edited it with Notepad, and am
attaching the edited file to THIS message. No CRC or other errors at any
point.

As it says in my Sig, I'm running Win7 Ultimate x64, the RTM version 7600
from TechNet that I installed in August. My floppy disk drive is a very old
(15 years?) "combination" drive, with both 5.25" and 3.5" in a single
half-height internal case. (Remember those?) The only floppy driver is
what is built into the mobo and Win7.

What did you do - step by step? At what step did it fail? What error
message(s) (VERBATIM) did you see?

Well, curiosity got the better of me, so I DID boot from the floppy that I
made last night. I just set my BIOS to boot from the floppy drive, then
restarted the computer with the diskette in the drive - and it booted just
fine. DIR A: worked as expected; so did DIR C: to read the first partition
on the first HDD. I even TYPEd the contents of a file in a folder - er,
directory!

First time I've booted MS-DOS, or booted from a floppy, in years!

What you did, is what I can't do, or rather what can't be done with my
system, and the Windows 7 64bit OS / Gigabyte MB with AMD 790GX chipset
combination.

I can't format a floppy disk, without getting errors, and thus
formatting with the option of making a boot diskette can't be done.

Quick formatting a floppy disk can be done, however the formatting
process ends up with bad disks, although the process shows a Finished
message.

I have a second PC, that has a Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4 motherboard with
an AMD 790X + SB600 Chipset, and a Phenom 9600 CPU. It is running the
Vista Home Premium 64bit version. It has been running without issues for
almost 2 years, and I have never seen any problems regarding the TLB
(Transition Lookaside Buffer) errata. :-) Formatting a floppy disk with
the second PC doesn't give any problems.

Bye the way, I am one of the persons that have been pleased with Windows
Vista. People in this newsgroup has provided a lot of solutions for
setting up the OS.

I just read that there will be a Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in 2010. I
hope that it will bring a fix for the issue.

I wonder how the C: drive can be read, in a DOS session, booted from a
floppy drive. I guess it's a ramdrive that has been made when the system
booted with a Windows start diskette?

I haven't seen a "combination" drive, with both 5.25" and 3.5" :-)
before, but I have a 5.25" 360kb/1.2mb drive combination on the loft.
Could come handy if I ever want to restore the PCTools backups I did way
back, from the 5.25" diskettes that is also on the loft. ROTFL

Since your problem appears to be rather rare I would not expect
Microsoft to "fix" something that really doesn't seems to be broken. I
frequent the Win 7 forum over at TechNet and I have never seen a post
about floppy formatting problems.

I think your problem is something with your hardware or a problem with
one or more system files.

Something in your specific hardware is causing your
inability to format a floppy.

For the record, I built my only computer (I've always had only one computer
at a time) 3 years ago, when we finished the Vista beta and got the free RTM
DVD. I ran Vista Ultimate x64 until the Win7 pre-beta a year ago and
quickly transitioned to Win7 Ultimate x64 - and seldom even boot into Vista
anymore.

My computer's main components:
EPoX MF570sli mainboard with 08/01/06 BIOS
(My 3rd EPoX mobo, but EPoX went out of business a couple of years ago.)
nVidia nForce 570 sli chipset
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ CPU (It was fast 3 years ago!)
4 GB OCZ PC-6400 DDR2 RAM
4 SATA HDDs: 200 GB Maxtor; 1 GB Seagate; 2 300 GB Seagates in RAID 1
2 DVD Burners (Pioneer and LG w/LightScribe)
1 very old combination floppy drive (because of mismatched connectors on
cable, I can connect only one (3.5" or 5.25") at a time)

MS-DOS has been able to read hard drives since its beginning. After all,
the "D" in MS-DOS (and PC-DOS) is for "Disk", not Diskette. ;^} And the
hard disk is C: because A: and B: were at first reserved for the two
floppies. DOS can't read the Windows Registry, so it doesn't know what
letters have been assigned to other volumes on the HDs, but it can always
find Drive C:. No, it's not a ram drive. I used ram drives for years, back
when HDs were small and slow, but haven't needed one in a long time. I
understand that some Windows Setup programs used ram drives (maybe still
do?), but I seldom even hear them mentioned nowadays. Remember TSR
(Terminate but Stay Resident) applications? They were some of the first
methods of multi-tasking.

I've been computing since the first TRS-80 (before they called it Model I)
in December 1977, so I've been through a lot of computers, one machine at a
time.

That's what I've been trying to suggest for some time. :-)
It's no big issue, now that I'm aware of the problem, so I don't flash
with a BIOS stored on a floppy disk, copied from Windows 7

If I Google for the issue, I can see that I share the Problem with a few
others
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...a-3fa1cd77cac6

My first PC was a Commodore 8088, with 2 x 5.1/4 360kb floppy drives, no
HD's. That was in 1989 :-)

I started running OS/2 in 1991, and I have been running the various
versions of OS/2 until the year 2000. I was running BBS and as a Fidonet
Point on my OS/2 system. If you care, you can see some details about
Fidonet here: http://www.fidonet.org/inet92_Randy_Bush.txt

For the fun of it, I have a copy of my OS/2 system, from when it was
running way back, as a virtual machine in VPC 2007

I started running Windows XP x64 In January 2004, when the first beta
was released to the public. Bye the way, I was a moderator on
PlanetAMD64 for a couple of years.

I have made a VistaPE boot cd (with WinBuilder version 074) in order to
read the NTFS formatted drives. If it can be done from a DOS boot disk,
I can save the time it takes for the CD to boot, will you tell me how to
do it?

Sorry. I've seen others talk about VistaPE and Bart's PE for years, but
I've never tried either of them myself. I'm not sure I ever heard of
WinBuilder. As I said, my little experiment yesterday is the first time
I've booted into MS-DOS or from a floppy in years.

I did the same thing, but for a different reason. I put a second
video card in my machine, and the floppy drive started to act up.
(Perhaps I reversed the cable in the process?) The space was so
limited in that corner of the board (ASUS P6T Deluxe V2) that I took
the floppy drive out entirely. I now don't have that floppy cable in
the way of the video card. I also have a cleaner look on my case
without the floppy. The BIOS for the motherboard is 2 MB, so it won't
fit on a floppy anyway. I am worried if I ever have to flash my SCSI
card, however, as making a bootable USB drive does not appear to be
simple. I do have a USB floppy, fortunately.

LDJ is not the only one with the FDD issue. We met on another post and I to have a drive that's unusable with Win7. The drive Will read and open files from a disk (disk made from an XP machine). When any attempt to Copy/Write to or from the disk renders it useless and corrupted. Take the disk to my WinXP PC and I'm told the disk is not formatted/corrupted file system. The disk(s) are good and work as advertised in the XP machine but not with Win7.
I've spent many hours troubleshooting and trying to pin point something and the only correlation I see is late model AMD chipsets and Win7.
My USB floppy drive works very well with Win7 and no issues.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4GHz
ASUS M4A79T Deluxe 790FX AM3 MB
3x1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600
ASUS EAH4850 Radeon 1GB Video
WD 150GB VelociRaptor 10K HDD
Nippen Lab FDD (x2)
Plextor PX-880SA DVD Burner/Lightscribe
Corsair 550W PS

It is absolutely a Windows 7 bug. I have three computers, all with AMD
processors, that run Vista 32 and 64 bit with no problems.
Upon doing a clean install of Windows 7 RC1, the problem of not being able
to do a full format of a floppy appears. I can change the floppy drive and
cable with no change in the result. As someone said earlier, I can do a
quick format, and it appears to work, but the floppy is corrupted. I can
boot any of these machines from a Windows 98 floppy and run the format B:
/F:1.44 command on any of the floppies that failed on Windows 7.

It is not a hardware problem. It is a Microsoft bug. I don't think it is
rare.

Just to see if the problem was caused by an AMD bug, I built an Intel system
with an i7 820 and an MSI P55 GD65 motherboard. It worked once, or appeared
to work, and so I thought I had discovered evidence for the problem
belonging to AMD. A few days later I tried it again and it did not work. I
proceeded to uninstall all the drivers and apps that I had installed in the
meantime, and that did not help. So, I wiped the drive and installed Windows
7 64bit again. Again the floppy will not format. It will appear to do a
quick format, but it does not do it correctly, and the floppy is corrupted.

I am tired of testing. So, whether anyone has reported the bug to Microsoft
does not mean a thing to me. Maybe that is because it is exceedingly
difficult to report anything to Microsoft? Maybe no one at Microsoft has a
floppy drive on their computers? Maybe they all threw away all of their
floppies? Maybe they think we are all crazy?

I know that most people don't think much of people that still use floppies,
but I find it very hard to write the contents of the flash drive on the
outside of the thing. I own several, and they are nice, they hold a lot of
data, they fit into my pocket, but where do I put the label on them? Yes, I
expect some wise-guy crack about that, but what I really would like is for
Microsoft to see if they can replicate this problem and fix it. It is
obviously a regression from Vista, and makes Microsoft look really
incompetent. Unless Microsoft is trying to help with the killing of the
floppy. A floppy is very useful when working on computers running Windows XP
or earlier. It looks like XP will be with us for a long time.