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Unable to Format Floppy Disk

Unable to Format Floppy Disk
« on: April 03, 2010, 03:45:40 pm »
Hi,

Not too sure if there is a post on this forum about this issue. If so perhaps the moderator can link to it.
I have just built (4 weeks ago) a system using a GA-MA790XT-UD4P motherboard and loaded with winodws 7. From day one I was unable to format or write to any floppies however I could read floppies made on other machines. The format command completed but the disk was unuseable in other machines as it was corrupt. Numerous threads have been posted on other sites with no solutions. It was implied that this was an AMD chipset and Windows 7 issue. I have spent many hours looking into this problem as I wanted to flash my bios as I couldn't get my usb pen to be recognised by the flash utility (another issue!).
Today I came across an article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_700_chipset_series) that listed issues at the bottom of the page. This included one for Linux that resulted in corrupt disks. I decided to try their fix and it worked.
The issue is the HPET in bios if set to enable it causes a conflict with DMA. I disabled mine and once the corrupt disks were given a full format then they became fully usable again.
I don't know if by disabling HPET will have any effect on my computer, perhaps someone can tell me what I can expect to happen with it disabled.

By disabling HPET does this mean its a hardware problem or just an incompatibility between windows7 and AMD chipsets?

Regards

Peter
« Last Edit: April 03, 2010, 03:48:14 pm by Fishmad »