OK, in my 98 box at home, I just noticed that my computer says I have a 5¼ Floppy drive. The odd thing is that I have NO floppy drive at all. Why would it see something that doesn't exist? The BAD thing is that windoze says that "Drive A is using an MS-DOS compatibility mode file system." This is a problem since it affects system performance. Any ideas on how to get rid of it?

What does the BIOS think the first floppy drive is? The "compatibility mode file system" is probably referring to the expected format of floppy disks. And the default Win95/98/Me filesystem is VFAT, which is just as slow as FAT16, and there would only be a performace impact if you were writing to that drive anyway.

--Nathan

I am not positive, but I remember Win95 always showing an floppy drive whether there was one present or not. Maybe 98 does the same?

When it says "compatibility mode file system" it doesn't mean FAT12. Normally Windows will directly access the hardware itself with it's own drivers. In this case it's found something strange and it's using the old MSDOS interfaces which are much slower in comparision.

Apparently this can be caused by a virus so check for that as well. Look at the BIOS settings first though.

I am not positive, but I remember Win95 always showing an floppy drive whether there was one present or not. Maybe 98 does the same?

Yes...Windows 98 will do this as well. It does it on my I-Opener, which doesn't even have a floppy header. But try disabling it in the BIOS, some people have good results doing that.

Yes...Windows 98 will do this as well. It does it on my I-Opener, which doesn't even have a floppy header. But try disabling it in the BIOS, some people have good results doing that.

ISTR the reasoning behind this is that some crap OSes (or is it some crap BIOSes?) won't boot floppy images from El Torito bootable CD-ROMs unless the BIOS thinks there's a physical floppy drive present.

Peter

OK, just so we're all up to date, I have no floppy at all, no floppy controller in Bios, Bios expects no floppy. I guess I may need to add one and see if that helps. Stupid, I know. One of these days I'm just going to have to go to XP or 2k. And since my PC is starting to slow down of late, it may be soon. Thanks for the input guys. It's stupid that 98 just can't handle the fact that I don't have a floppy.