Arthur Frank wrote in message ...
>Hello,
>
>I have a floppy drive on a PC that is misbehaving in a very unusual manner.
When the drive >is accessed for the first time, it works perfectly.  But,
any subsequent use runs into >problems.  It seems like the drive (or the
drive's controller on the motherboard) is somehow >"storing" the directory
structure of the first floppy it accesses.
>......

MS-DOS used to cache the directory structure of a floppy, for performance.
It would monitor a signal on the floppy controller-- either "disk eject", or
"disk insert" or whatever, and when it sensed that the disk was changed, it
knew that it had to reload the directory from the now-new floppy.  (and
before that, in CP/M, you would hit control-C to tell it to do the same
thing...)  Since, as the saying goes, Windows is "the big colorful clown
suit for DOS" (and DOS was CP/M on steroids), I expect that it still behaves
the same way.  But, this directory cache refresh is supposed to happen
automagically.

>I've swapped out the drive (which was a hassle ....but that didn't fix it.
Is it the cable?  The >motherboard?

Unless you are just unlucky and have gotten two floppy drives with bad
disk-in sensors, I would suspect either your cable, or the floppy
controller.  Since the cable is cheaper, try that first :-)  Also, if you
have a friend who will let you, you might try your old floppy drive in their
PC, to see whether or not it works there...  If you have a motherboard with
a built-in floppy controller... usually there are jumpers to disable the
onboard controller.

Hope this helps,
lcl