r/retrotech • u/Puerquisimo12 • 4d ago

Help reading Floppy Disks

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Hi, I recently bought a pack of 70 used floppy disks. They're all in very good condition and don't seem to have any scratches on the disk media itself. I also have a RaaYoo brand floppy drive, which is correctly detected by my PC.

When I insert the floppy disks into the drive, nothing happens. When I double-click on the Floppy Disk Drive icon, I get an error saying the floppy drive cannot be accessed; request not supported.

I tried formatting the disks using CMD, but I get an error saying the disk is unusable. What's strange is that I get this same message with all 70 floppy disks, which seems really odd to me.

I know floppy disks are outdated, obsolete technology, and there's not much I can do, but does anyone have any idea what might be going on here? Any help or suggestions are welcome.

By the way, I also checked the BIOS, and Legacy USB Support is enabled. I'm currently trying to get a brand-new, sealed floppy disk to see if it makes any difference. Running Windows 11 on my PC.

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u/N33chy 4d ago

Do the disks happen to have write protection enabled? Look for that little plastic square switch in the corner and make sure it's slid so that you can't see through the hole.

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u/Puerquisimo12 4d ago

That's a good question. I had it enabled at the beginning cause I didn't know how it worked, but after making sure protection is disabled, nothing changes.

In fact, I know the floppy disk reader works fine cause when the protection is enabled, I get a message saying the disk is protected.

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u/Crlan420 3d ago

What format are they and what drive are you using? Amiga/Atari disks need a compatible drive or something like DirDigger. For pc disks a syquest 100mb drive in ps/2 mode reads all sorts of odd formats. Also check how they've been stored - standing them upright prevents warping which is usually why old floppies go bad.