A: drive wont refresh after putting in a new disk.

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sc3252

Gawd
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Jan 3, 2005
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I have this problem where the A drive wont refresh after putting in a new disk. So what happens is the user will put in a disk at start up, the A drive reads it and displays the contents of the drive. The user then copies something from it or puts something else on the drive, after it is ejected the contents stay in the drive folder as if the floppy is still in the drive. After that if I put a new disk into the clients computer it wont read the new disk, but will continue to display data from the old disk.

Things I have tried:
I have tried uninstalling the drive from the device manager and reinstalling it, I checked to see if there was something wrong with the drive by going into dos and inserting multiple disks to see if it would display all of them(it did display all of them). The one thing that would work in windows was going into the device manager and disabling the a drive, and then renable it, the drive would then refresh and take a new disk, but if a new disk is put in after that the steps would have to be repeated.

The specs of the machine are
pentium 4 with hyper threading
memory 1GB-2GB(cant remember exactly)
windows xp pro
hard drive is 80-160GB hard drive.

Any input would be helpful, since I am a little stumped on it. The only thing I can think of is reimaging the pc(and that is to time consuming for the client).
 
Umm this is how floppy drives have worked for years.

After loading in a new disk try pressing the F5 key while in the A: Drive window. That will force a refresh thus loading the contents of the new disk that has been inserted.
 
seconded - floppy drives have no auto reporting on eject/present, and because the head actually touches the media, they don't do a constant check. you have to refresh.
 
Well,kinda :)

Some drives incorporate what is called a "Change Line". If equipped, the change line goes active when a new disc is installed so the OS knows it must refresh before presenting a directory.

At least that's the way it worked with 5.25's. Not sure about the newer 1.44's.

I would think it would still be needed though.
 
TechLarry said:
Well,kinda :)

Some drives incorporate what is called a "Change Line". If equipped, the change line goes active when a new disc is installed so the OS knows it must refresh before presenting a directory.

At least that's the way it worked with 5.25's. Not sure about the newer 1.44's.

I would think it would still be needed though.
Click to expand...

that requires different hardware from most 3.25" disk drives ;) Something like the apple drives, with auto-eject and stuff.
 
LoStMaTt said:
Umm this is how floppy drives have worked for years.

After loading in a new disk try pressing the F5 key while in the A: Drive window. That will force a refresh thus loading the contents of the new disk that has been inserted.
Click to expand...

If all they had to do was click refresh or hit F5 I wouldn't be here. The fact is that it wont refresh from F5, and there is no second A: Drive in the machine.
 
sc3252 said:
If all they had to do was click refresh or hit F5 I wouldn't be here. The fact is that it wont refresh from F5, and there is no second A: Drive in the machine.
Click to expand...

Then you should have said as much.

The drive is probably dying. Got a spare? This is a common symptom of a drive kicking it.
 
The old 5.25's had it. Kinda seems important enough to not remove from 3.5's :)

I'll have to see if this is still used. You got me on it now :)

lopoetve said:
that requires different hardware from most 3.25" disk drives ;) Something like the apple drives, with auto-eject and stuff.
Click to expand...
 
As best I can tell, today's drives still incorporate the change line.

Now, here's someting interesting. It is pin 34 of the interface/cable.

Since one end or the other of a cable is usually the first to lose contact when a cable is not fully inserted, I would open her up and check/re-seat the floppy cable on both ends.

It could be that simple.
 
TechLarry said:
As best I can tell, today's drives still incorporate the change line.

Now, here's someting interesting. It is pin 34 of the interface/cable.

Since one end or the other of a cable is usually the first to lose contact when a cable is not fully inserted, I would open her up and check/re-seat the floppy cable on both ends.

It could be that simple.
Click to expand...

None of my drives use it : The one remaining 5.25 does, but there is no activity when inserting a 3.25 in the drive except on my old LC3
 
You won't see activity. All it does it tell windows that it needs to re-fresh the contents if you try to access the drive directory.

It simply sets the line active so windows knows the disk was changed.
 
TechLarry said:
You won't see activity. All it does it tell windows that it needs to re-fresh the contents if you try to access the drive directory.

It simply sets the line active so windows knows the disk was changed.
Click to expand...

hmm. none of them do that either :-p
 
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