HELP!!! Floppy drive problems with NT 3.51

[Shawn Johnson]

I have had problems with my floppy drives since I installed NT 3.51 and
have no idea what the problem could be. The drives are perfectly
accessible in Win95 and DOS, but in NT (shell and File Manager) I get the
following error message when trying to access a disk:

The volume does not contain a recognized file system.
Please make sure that all required drivers are loaded and
that the volume is not corrupt.

Needless to say, it's been an unpleasant experience having to bounce
to Win95 or DOS to do file accessing.

Can someone look up the error message in the Resource guide? Maybe that
will shed some light.

----------------------
Technical info:

I have a Buslogic BT-X10A IDE Caching controller for 2 IDE drives and my
floppy drives.

I have a Buslogic BT-545C SCSI Host adapter controlling my CD-ROM and my 1
GIG SCSI hard drive.

BIOS has the disk swapping function disabled.
---------------------

Could there be an interrupt conflict that Win95 doesn't see but NT does?
I checked the Services and Devices and don't see a problem. Is there a
way to run some type of NT diagnostics to check for a problem? I
understand that NT 3.5 had a debug version of NTDETECT.COM, but I don't
know if NT 3.51 has it or what, and how to run it.

Is there any diagnostic type software readily available to help diagnose
the problem? MSD won't do the trick, really.

Any help is appreciated.. I'm at the end of my patience.

Thanks,

Shawn Johnson
sjoh...@execpc.com

[Douglas Whitten]

Hi.

I, too, am having problems reading my floppy drive from NT, even
though it accesses fine from Windows 3.1, 95, or DOS.

In my case, the floppy is "read-only": I can read files already
on the diskette, but the minute I try to write to the floppy, the
FAT filesystem gets corrupted and all data is lost.

If, after the corruption, I run chkdisk, it reports a lot of lost
clusters. If I try to have it fix things, however, it says it
"can't write the boot sector". From that point on, the diskette
is considered to have the RAW FS, rather than FAT FS.

This has only happened on one machine (my home machine!) There
are a couple of dozen at work which have had no problems at all.

My NT is unmodified 3.51+SP2 (the problem was present in 3.51 and
3.51+SP1).

[Rick Steeves]

In article <468tub$43d$1...@mhadg.production.compuserve.com>,
Douglas Whitten <7525...@CompuServe.COM> wrote:
>Hi.

>
>In my case, the floppy is "read-only": I can read files already
>on the diskette, but the minute I try to write to the floppy, the
>FAT filesystem gets corrupted and all data is lost.
>

>This has only happened on one machine (my home machine!) There
>are a couple of dozen at work which have had no problems at all.

I had htis same problem, and many gurus had no answer for me -
i had to find it by myself.

When I had first purchased my machines, I had (of course :) )
tweaked settings until they were optimal. This included minorly
upping the bus speed, which of course included my I/O controller
(Promise 2300+ BTW). Upon decreasing the bus speed back to < 8mHz
it soalved my problem. Increasing it again recaused it.

Rick
ri...@acpub.duke.edu
(let me know if this solves your problems)

[Mark Cairns]

I have the exact same situation...only recently though...!!!

I thought it was the controller cable not in correctly, but upon
booting back to DOS/Windows it is fine.....

The problem seems to be sporadic though...I have been able to write to
disks...sometimes....

If anyone has a solution...that would be great...Oh...my problem is
the home machine as well...

Mark

Douglas Whitten <7525...@CompuServe.COM> wrote:

>Hi.

>I, too, am having problems reading my floppy drive from NT, even

>though it accesses fine from Windows 3.1, 95, or DOS.

>In my case, the floppy is "read-only": I can read files already

>on the diskette, but the minute I try to write to the floppy, the
>FAT filesystem gets corrupted and all data is lost.

>If, after the corruption, I run chkdisk, it reports a lot of lost

>clusters. If I try to have it fix things, however, it says it
>"can't write the boot sector". From that point on, the diskette
>is considered to have the RAW FS, rather than FAT FS.

>This has only happened on one machine (my home machine!) There

>are a couple of dozen at work which have had no problems at all.

>My NT is unmodified 3.51+SP2 (the problem was present in 3.51 and
>3.51+SP1).

[Mark Cairns]

Just as a follow on...

I have Award BIOS. Does anyone know if this problem is attributed to
the BIOS..??

Any assistance would be great...I tried to create an Emergency
Recovery Disk today...NO LUCK....

Thanks...

Mark
***************************************************************************************************

[Christian Mueller-Planitz]

mca...@interlog.com (Mark Cairns) wrote:

>>>I, too, am having problems reading my floppy drive from NT, even
>>>though it accesses fine from Windows 3.1, 95, or DOS.

>>>In my case, the floppy is "read-only": I can read files already
>>>on the diskette, but the minute I try to write to the floppy, the
>>>FAT filesystem gets corrupted and all data is lost.

I have had something similar a while ago (under DOS no problem; under
NT bad sectors/read error). The fix was to reduce the DMA clock speed
in the bios setup (the data transfer between memory and FD controller
uses DMA).

I am not sure whether this applies to your problem: When I did this I
had a 486-DX50 (50MHz bus clock).

--CMP