Hello everyone ive looked eveywhere but i cant seem to get a answer to this question so I thought i should get on a forum.

Ok i am currently using a 2month old comp that didnt come with a floppy drive, but i need a floppy drive for school so i took a drive off of my old packard bell.

when i try to READ a disk in my COMPUTER i get the error message

A:/ is not accessible
no id address mask found on the floppy disk

so is this a physical problem so something i can do in the control panel?Demon_kazuya....When you installed the floppy drive didnt your operating system see it and install it ?
Is it not showing up in My Computer ? Go into your bios and see if it shows up in there...Do you have the ribbon cable between the floppy drive and the mobo the right way around...?

let us know
dl65  thank you for helping me

im pretty SURE the ribbon is connected the right way because when i first installed it the led light was always on until i flipped it and put it BACK on

it is showing up in my computer

and im sorry i dont know what bios isComputer BIOS information and helpok now i am no longer getting those messages about id masks

now my problem is that my drive cannot format disks

ok ill try my best to explain this since i dont know much about computing

i go to my comp with a disk in my floppy drive
and i double click the a: drive

it then tells me I have to format my disk and then opens up a format window

I cant change any settings and I cant quickformat
I cant make a dos startup disk because of a I/0 Error
And I cant format  no matter how many time I try

I tryed formatting in dos and using alkonost maxformat program

So I guess my prob is i cant read because I cant format
Ps i am using a floppy drive that came with a win95 computer but I am currently using WinXp home edition, is that the problem?Demon_kazuya........So if I understand you ........now you are able to see drive A in  My Computer .....ok and if you put a floppy in the drive with data on it .....you can see the data ok .........So exactly what is it your trying to do ? If your trying to get a boot disk......go to Bootdisk .COM and d/l a win98 boot disk and save it to your floppy in drive A..........
Here's a though .....I believe win XP only supports ......NTFS or Fat 32 if you are using a disk that was created using win95 it may be fat16......just a thought.

let us know

dl65  what is happening here is when you place a floppy disk in the disk drive  winxp its expects to read a winxp disk or fat 32  which has already been stated ...can the floppy data be download for winxp to read it.
? is this a special disk that needs to read >the floppy drive is not in question here as its can be used anyway since the dawn of pcs> ...its the disks? can you tell us what format they are written for ?what are you trying to do here...more info..on your  project..amigados had a cross platform dos program which could read anything..but thats lost at this moment Thank you for all your help but after everything ive done It must be easier to replace

I belive it is to old to use ntfs thus I think i wasted a couple of days....

Ah well im goin to best buy tommarow to buy a new one

I didnt realise how cheap they are now

And thanks again