We have a Dell Inspiron notebook (about 18 months old or so) and a Dell Dimension 2400 (a few months old).

We both are in college and we do our homework in MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We do it on the laptop, and then save it to a disc on the external drive, bring the disc to the desktop, and access it from there.

Simple, right? Wrong. While this system worked perfectly for the first month to 6 weeks, all of the sudden the desktop can't seem to read some of the files we save on disc from the laptop.

At first I thought there was something just wrong with the floppy, but it's now been at least 7 different discs and files from all three aforementioned programs, and we're still having this problem.

What happens is that it saves just fine, but when we bring the disc to the desktop and try to open and/or attach a file, the desktop's A drive makes a weird noise for a while, and then the program either fails or we get a message saying that the disc can't be read. The weird thing is though, if I hook the laptop's external drive to the desktop, I can open the files just fine from there. Just not from the desktop's internal drive. Also, files that are saved on the desktop's A drive open just fine on either computer.

Both computers have been scanned for viruses and are clean.

Any idea what is causing this problem?

It sounds to me like the floppy disk drive in the desktop computer has failed. It should still be under warranty so a call to Dell's Technical Support line should get you a new floppy drive along with the installation instructions. This component change is very easy to do. This is the Dell Support page:

http://support.dell.com/

Dell Warranty Page

Dell Contact Information (including telephone)

I hope this is helpful!

Dwight

Hi Dwight

Thanks for answering

I will call them tomorrow, but I have already called once and they said that if both drives read discs, in other than this specific situation (when the info was saved on disc on the laptop), that it's neither of the drives but something internal. They said it's internal in the laptop (I don't know how they'd know that) and the laptop is no longer under warranty.

How do I get them to check it when they say that's not the problem?

I don't live near a Dell store and we're moving in 5 days.

Are the files being dragged and dropped to the floppy disk? Or, are you opening the document in Excel/Word, choosing File -> Save As and saving it to the disk?

We're using Save As exclusively.

My husband called Dell again today and it turns out that some how, we have no idea, some setting in the desktop was changed to disable the A: drive. We still have no idea how on earth that happened as we certainly aren't going around changing internal settings! But thankfully it is working now.

Thanks again!

Thank you for letting us know. I hope everything goes well with your move.

All my best wishes,
Dwight