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