Sometime over the last year, during the slow but sure erosion caused by using Windows Update at M$, both my Win 98 boxes seem to have lost their ability to access their floppy disks. I have swapped out for known good drives, but they dont work either.

There are no disabling settings in the BIOS, which I have reset and then re-configured, and it's still the same. It seems as if it's something that Win itself does to the drives.

Symptoms are - won't boot from drive A: even when designated first boot device with normal user access in BIOS, and always reports "Not ready" or "inaccessible" when looking at A: in Exploder.

Any one seen the same? Any ideas?

I inadvertantly set my wife's machine's bios to "2.88mb type 3" or somesuch, and it did the same thing, but I think that's a coincidence.

Are you running a tape backup system with these systems? This thread in dejanews may help.
As a last resort, Here's MS troubleshooting link

Are you sure that the floppy interface/controller is actually working?

Stig

Check wether the floppy controller is still enabled, I think you can still select the floppy settings in the other BIOS screens even if it's disabled.

Yeah, I'm with everyone else here. The only times I've had trouble getting a floppy disk drive working is when the BIOS, Windows, and the drive itself all disagreed on the type of floppy it was.

Most likely not the issue here, but I've connected a floppy drive cable backwards. It ends up corrupting the floppy and is frustrating b/c the drive light comes on and it looks like its working. I munched several boot floppies this way before figuring it out. If you're not booting from the floppy you can boot all the way up to the OS (at least W2k) and still have a: show up, although it's not functional in the least.

-Zeke

Yeah, agreed, and there's also the wrong-connector issue, where you connect the drive to the B connector on the floppy cable instead of the A connector.

There may in fact be a stealth floppy drive disabling setting in the BIOS, called "Swap FD" or something similar. This inverts the drive select line, so A: becomes B:. It's a sneaky setting that can cause hours of enjoyment if it gets turned on, by, for instance, a CMOS backup battery getting low and causing the BIOS settings to become a bit suspect.

pca

NOW, I remember what was wrong with my BIOS.