I have  a Pentium 2 computer running win95 and I just installed an old
5.25 floppy drive I'm having problems running my old programs on this
drive it will try to read the disk but ask me if I would like to
format the disk and will not open the floppy any further and in dos it
says it can not read the disk and if I select abort it tell me the
disk is no longer valid? So ether the disks I'm using have gone bad or
there is a bigger problem any ideas?

Thank You,
Justin

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Clarification of Question by mrfony-ga on 27 Jun 2003 16:04 PDT

I went into my bios and it is set correctly, it still will not read it
in dos or windows I decided to format one of my disks to see if it
would read the disk and it would in windows and in dos so does that
mean that the disks are ok or is my drive configured wrong?

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Request for Question Clarification by techtor-ga on 28 Jun 2003 01:57 PDT

How long have your disks been stored and how were they stored? If they
were exposed to dust or other elements, then they might have gone bad.
Unfortunately for floppies, when they're scratched, they're history.

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Request for Question Clarification by chromedome-ga on 28 Jun 2003 12:40 PDT

Do you know for sure that the drive you've installed is the
high-density 1.2MB type?  If you've inadvertantly installed one of the
older 360K drives it will not recognise a 1.2MB diskette.

I've assembled scavenged parts into working computers several times
for a non-profit organization, and I've done that more than once. 
Just a thought, for what it's worth.

-Chromedome

the drive might be set incorrectly in the BIOS. when the computer
starts up it should have something on the screen to the effect of
"press f2 for setup" or something similar. Hit whatever key it says,
and look around (often this is on the first page it shows you) for
installed drives. For floppy drives, make sure the one you have is
configured as "5.25" 1.2 meg". If it is configured as a smaller (250k
i think?) 5.25" drive, or as any size 3.5 inch drive, it will not read
the discs correctly.

It is very likely that the disks have oxidized and can't be read
from.Consider the life span of the floppies you use some may last a
few years at best.

It's my experience that older floppies (and floppy drives) are
actually more reliable than new ones. I've had 5.25" floppies from the
commodore days that still work!

It's entirely possible your floppies don't work anymore, but I suspect
a software misconfiguration or a hardware incompatibility.