I also have a wierd problem. I've had the xp for about two months, and on two seperate occasions when I went to access my disc, the display told me that it was unformatted. The first time I just reformatted it because I'd only had one or two songs on there I was working on. The second time, however, I was devestated because I had about fifteen on there and a few of them were close to being done. We're talking hours and hours of work, gone. Suddenly they weren't there anymore, and the xp was saying that the disc was not formatted. The second time it happened, I went to save a song and the xp suddenly froze up at 60% so I took the disc out and shut the machine off. When I put the disc back in, that's when I got the unformatted message.
Now for the wierd part...I was so shaken that my husband decided to try out the disc in his computer to see if the information was in fact there. It was. All my songs were on it. What he did was copy the disc onto the harddrive and then he took a brand new xp formatted disc and copied it onto the brand new one. That one worked in the xp, and my songs were saved.
The question is, why is it doing that? Has anyone else had that problem? I'm happy that my husband was able to save my songs, but I'm concerned about why it did that. They were there, but the xp wouldn't recognize it. Wierd. Let me know if anyone knows anything about this. I'd really appreciate it.

Pretty hairy story. There is nothing *normal* that would cause the XP to say a disk is unformatted if it in fact has been formatted, so it's either a faulty disk drive or a faulty disk. The latter is easier to determine than the former.

I would definitely mark the disks (was it one or two?) that prompted the synth to give the unformatted message, and put them aside. Start out with new diskettes and see if it happens again. If it does, evidence is mounting that something is wrong with your drive. If it does not, it was probably the disks themselves. You can always get the drive replaced and buy new diskettes.

Also, be careful when copying between disks: The backup function won't work between HD and DD disks.

Other than that, I think you're in the familiar world of determining by the process of elimination whether it's the drive or the diskettes. After starting out with new diskettes, if the problem doesn't recur, I'd probably dump the disks that originally prompted the problem.

Good luck.