I just bought an external usb floppy drive. It recognizes some of my downloaded net midis, but does not recognize the guitar center standard midi files that I once upon a time purchased. It keeps asking me if I want to format the disk in drive A (of course would erase). Any suggestions.

The product is Teac model. It does not need a driver, as my XP recognized and like said, it is allowing some stuff to show up.

Thx anyone.

Well, there are two types of mini floppies, the original 720K and the later 1.44mb...

Not all drives can read both types, although you should check the documentation that came with the USB drive to see what's up.

OK, thx Mac, will do

It is also quite possible if that disk is quite old that electro magnetic forces have simply corrupted the disk making it look unformatted. That is why it pays to have backups of files that came on floppy disk.

As mentioned above there are two types of floppies out there.

Be aware that there is an extra hole in the casing of the high density version.

A small number of floppy disc mechanisms detect this hole and then assume that the floppy disc is firstly of the type thus indicated and secondly IS FORMATTED TO MATCH. As a result, if you put a cross-formatted disc (either a 1.44 meg disc as a 720k, or a 720k one formatted as a 1.44) and it will not be able to read it.

It may be that your guitar centre discs are DD formatted but in a HD case. If theres a hole "top right" of the disc (looking at the label) where the "read only" hole (with the sliding closure mechanism behind it) is top left, then put a piece of tape over the "extra" hole and see if that helps!

The discs may be DD formatted because the first hardware sequencers / midi file playback devices used DD mechanisms.

Side issue: cross formatting is not recommended; despite what you may read on the internet DD discs are not just HD discs that failed the quality check, the specification of the magnetic material is different as well.

Thx again for the help. I have the extra holes on my other disks that work fine. But there is only (one) hole on the GC disks. I will be trying my old external drive tonight (wife took it to work). I thought they read fine in that one. The old keyboard drives read them fine, but that does me no good today.

Will check things out tonight and hopefully have better results, 'cause I just bought a bunch from Fran

All I'm looking to do is convert them to mp3.

Bingo: My older floppy drive worked! Sure is nice to have the simple things in life thrill me

I have a usb floppy drive that works with everything here in the studio.
It is made by MITSUMI and is a D353FUE 5v 500 ma and complies with FCC Standards for home or office use.
I seem to recall that it didn't cost a lot either.
Bebop

Seems like you got it sorted out, Zuki, but since Bebop put up a drive, I thought I'd add another to the list that seems to work on 'everything'. Don't remember exactly what I paid for it, but it was cheap (@ $35.00). It's the Ativa, model # FDUSB-TM2.

chas

Teac N533....Bought it on line for $25 new including shipping (4 years ago)..works great...USB portability