Phantom drives




I have been a subscriber for over 12 months and I find your magazine a great help when evaluating products, and the Help Screen is excellent. I now need some specific help with a Windows 95 "glitch".
I have a dual pentium with 32Mb EDO RAM. Windows 95 has taken it upon itself to recognise two floppy drives in my computer. This has happened out of the blue. Initially it recognised two floppy drives, both A: and B:, as 3.5in drives. Then suddenly it decided that A: was a 5.25in floppy drive and that B: was 3.5in. The reason I am now concerned is that the floppy disk drive used to be able to be read as A: or B:, but now neither is readable. I have used Norton Antivirus all along, with the machine working fine. I also have a SCSI chain with two hard drives, a ZIP drive and a CD-ROM.
MS-DOS recognises the floppy drive as B: and will read it. Windows 95 says I have a 5.25in floppy drive on A: and a 3.5in floppy drive on B:. These are both visible in My Computer and Explorer. If I try and read one, then there is no information. If I click Properties on either "phantom" drive, then I get details but still cannot read disks. Device Manager has an exclamation mark next to the floppy controller and says that the device is not present, not working properly or has drivers missing. My CMOS settings are correct with A: as 3.5in FDD and B: as Not Installed.
This all used to work fine, so what has happened? I have tried removing the floppy controller then Win 95 reinstalls it -- to no avail. Is this a Windows 95 fault, a virus or a conflict?
I would really appreciate help if you have the time to nut this out.
- Tim Roberts


What kind of motherboard/BIOS are you using? Your machine sounds like it's completely confused. You've already tried the obvious fixes, such as removing the floppy device drivers from Windows and letting the OS find the floppy controller again after a hard reset. As you say, this is achieved by right-clicking on My Computer then selecting Properties--Device Manager. Delete the floppy disk driver and reboot and Windows 95 should reinstall it.
If this fails, then you are in trouble. Presumably Windows 95 is not interrogating the BIOS properly when it starts up. Since there is only one floppy drive, and Windows sees two, you may even need a clean install to remove any historical hardware data. Check all your add-in boards. My floppy drive uses IRQ 6. Have you installed a card using an occupied interrupt or could the jumpers on your floppy controller be incorrectly set?

Delete the floppy disk driver, reboot and Windows 95 should reinstall it

Reinstalling is boring, but the complex -- even mystical nature -- of Windows 95 sometimes defies all rational explanation. How important is your time? Diving into the registry and system files can be fun, but there's no guarantee you'll fix the problem. If you do a complete reinstall, and you still have problems, then you can at least point the bone at your hardware supplier.
- Tony Locke


Category: Hardware, Win95
Issue: Oct 1997
Pages: 152-155

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