donb@megatek.UUCP (Don Bontemps) (01/30/91)
My 3 1/2" floppy disk drive on my computer acts flakey. It will be working just fine, then all of a sudden I can't access the disk anymore. The only thing that wakes the disk drive up is an alt+ctrl+del reset. Then the same ca ca happens again. The hard disk (C:) works just fine, though. Does anyone know what could be causing this problem ?
louisg@vpnet.chi.il.us (Louis Giliberto) (01/31/91)
If you're having the same problem I had, it has to do with how the program you're using makes DOS calls. My problem was that often when installing commercial software, I would have to put in the next disk. When I did this, the install program wouldn't be able to recognize the fact that I put the correct disk in. (In fact, this happened with the ToolBox promo included with Windows 3). Well, I couldn't figure it out, and then one day it happened from the DOS prompt. I had switched disks in the A: drive, and DOS kept asking me to insert the disk I had just taken out. Bingo. These programs do something funky that you can't do with PC-DOS 4.0 (I dunno about MS-DOS). What I think happens is that they don't close open files correctly. It never happened to me with the hard drive, so I would copy the files into a temp dir on the HD, and install it from that temp dir to the dir I wanted them in. I also had to keep my data files on the HD. I don't know if this is BIOS or DOS, but I noticed that no one who has lower than DOS 4.0 has this problem. If you have an older version of DOS, try that. It doesn't sound like a hardware problem, but I don't know what you mean by "can't wake it up." Louis