floppy drive question

     My wifes laptop floppy drive seems to have a problem , whenever she saves anything to a floppy the laptop can read it , but no other computer can . All we get is a message saying " cannot read from source disk " or something along the lines of " disk is not properly formated , yet put it back in the laptop and everything is fine . What could be the problem ? She doesn't use encryption or anything similar and this ones got me pulling my hair out . Thanks for any help or insights in advance .

Using two different OS?

that happened to me for a few years, through reinstalls, etc.

i just got a new floppy drive and it stopped. Have you tried making a bootable MSDOS floppy or formatting it with an alternative formatting tool like rawrite? There's not much you can do to resolve it outside of checking the cables. FD don't have drivers, applications, fixes.

You could also try uninstalling it through Device Manager and letting it reinstall.

Maybe the read/write heads of the drive are out of line and other drives go to try to read the data and can't because their heads are properly aligned.

I'm not sure how to solve this other than getting a new drive, unfortunately. USB floppy drives are maybe $30-50 but they'll work almost anywhere. You might be better off getting her a 256MB USB flash drive.

     Thanks for the info . I've tried all the diagnostics and they report it as being fine , but if the heads are out of alignment it would test as okay , I take it .

This page might be useful: http://www.accurite.com/FloppyPrimer.html

But in the end, it'll probably be faster to just get a new drive (unless you're wanting to know what's wrong just to know).

If the laptop is still under warranty, I'd recommend getting the drive replaced.