What motherboard and what version of Windows ? XP does not support 5.25" drives natively, at all, AFAIK and have tried.
You can boot from a DOS floppy and try it. Does the BIOS have a "flopping seek" enable ? on older boards you could enable it and was a good thing to check for the head stepper moving things proper.
If above fails I suggest trying the floppy on a known to work motherboard/computer that truly supports 1.2Mb floppies (486, Pentium, P2 era)

Horun wrote on 2024-02-11, 03:10:

What motherboard and what version of Windows ? XP does not support 5.25" drives natively, at all, AFAIK and have tried.
You can boot from a DOS floppy and try it. Does the BIOS have a "flopping seek" enable ? on older boards you could enable it and was a good thing to check for the head stepper moving things proper.
If above fails I suggest trying the floppy on a known to work motherboard/computer that truly supports 1.2Mb floppies (486, Pentium, P2 era)

This is in Windows 10. My understanding is that it works (even 11) for read/write, but not for formatting.

I do have a 486 I can try it in as well.

ubertrout wrote on 2024-02-11, 02:57:

the disc seems to be spinning but the read head isn't moving at all.

Heads will not move if there is no reason for them to move. If the OS can't find data on track 0 it will not attempt to read the rest of the floppy, since the format is unknown.
Does your BIOS have an option to seek floppy drive(s) on boot? If so turn that on and you should see the heads move half-way and back during POST. If there is no such option then just gently move the heads inwards with the power off and then power the system back on. Heads should now return to track 0. This doesn't tell you if the mobo can move the heads but at least you'll know the drive electronics and motor itself are working.

Deunan wrote on 2024-02-11, 17:07:

Heads will not move if there is no reason for them to move. If the OS can't find data on track 0 it will not attempt to read the rest of the floppy, since the format is unknown.
Does your BIOS have an option to seek floppy drive(s) on boot? If so turn that on and you should see the heads move half-way and back during POST. If there is no such option then just gently move the heads inwards with the power off and then power the system back on. Heads should now return to track 0. This doesn't tell you if the mobo can move the heads but at least you'll know the drive electronics and motor itself are working.

Thanks, this is helpful. The heads move a little at boot, but the BIOS is way too new to have advanced floppy features like that. It's a miracle it supports 5.25 drives at all. I think next step is to swap it for the known working one in my 486 and troubleshoot it in there.

BTW, not only does Windows 10 still support 5.25 drives, it even still has an icon for them.

IIRC there were certain setups that can prevent Windows 10 from supporting floppy drives. One is probably UEFI instead of legacy BIOS. But for me IIRC it was when I moved to use GPT instead of MBR.
When I had MBR and floppy support in Win10, it turned out to be quite annoying, as Win10's bloated background tasks kept touching all drives every few seconds, so the floppy drive was continuously giving access sounds even if no disk was there.
And I remember even when I wanted to read/write disks with it, Win10 would add stupid files by itself to the disk. That was detrimental as I want to archive the disk, not ruin them.

So yeah, I lost disk support in Win10/11, but the experience wasn't something to be missed really.

wbahnassi wrote on 2024-02-12, 09:39:

IIRC there were certain setups that can prevent Windows 10 from supporting floppy drives. One is probably UEFI instead of legacy […]
Show full quote

IIRC there were certain setups that can prevent Windows 10 from supporting floppy drives. One is probably UEFI instead of legacy BIOS. But for me IIRC it was when I moved to use GPT instead of MBR.
When I had MBR and floppy support in Win10, it turned out to be quite annoying, as Win10's bloated background tasks kept touching all drives every few seconds, so the floppy drive was continuously giving access sounds even if no disk was there.
And I remember even when I wanted to read/write disks with it, Win10 would add stupid files by itself to the disk. That was detrimental as I want to archive the disk, not ruin them.

So yeah, I lost disk support in Win10/11, but the experience wasn't something to be missed really.

The board is from 2006 and I'm pretty sure it's legacy, not UEFI. Drives are MBR. But I have XP on the system in dual-boot and I can try it again in XP just to look.

I have noticed that Windows is touching the drive a lot, interesting point.

I think the last Microsoft OS with decent floppy support was WinXP. Not sure about Win7 of the 32-bit variety but anything x64 was gutted already. Formatting is no longer possible, only read and write - an even then there are possibly format restrictions, not sure if single-sided 160kB or 180kB floppies would work at all. Win10 can be very annoying with creating the hidden folders (with long names) that it uses to track removable media. I'm using Win10 Pro and I had to search the net on how to disable it for my USB floppy drives (and Windows still kept doing it for CF cards afterwards, had to resort to some deeper OS policy changes).

For any archival purposes I'd probably install a switch to disable the write gate signal on the drive, just to be sure stupid OS won't try messing it up. These days I'm using Greaseweazle anyway, it's a proper tool for creating raw dumps and it can "format" a disk by simply low-level writing image to it. I only use 3.5" USB drive with Win10, it's for transferring files to and from DOS-era machines that don't have network access, and it can't be easily installed.

Deunan wrote on 2024-02-12, 21:16:

I think the last Microsoft OS with decent floppy support was WinXP. Not sure about Win7 of the 32-bit variety but anything x64 was gutted already. Formatting is no longer possible, only read and write - an even then there are possibly format restrictions, not sure if single-sided 160kB or 180kB floppies would work at all. Win10 can be very annoying with creating the hidden folders (with long names) that it uses to track removable media. I'm using Win10 Pro and I had to search the net on how to disable it for my USB floppy drives (and Windows still kept doing it for CF cards afterwards, had to resort to some deeper OS policy changes).

For any archival purposes I'd probably install a switch to disable the write gate signal on the drive, just to be sure stupid OS won't try messing it up. These days I'm using Greaseweazle anyway, it's a proper tool for creating raw dumps and it can "format" a disk by simply low-level writing image to it. I only use 3.5" USB drive with Win10, it's for transferring files to and from DOS-era machines that don't have network access, and it can't be easily installed.

This is useful info, thanks. That said, I'll confess this is something more of a novelty than a serious tool right now, and I do have a Greaseweazle for more serious uses.