You receive an error message when you access files from a floppy disk in Excel

When you access a file directly from a floppy disk in Microsoft Excel, you may receive an error message if you remove the disk from the drive while the file is still open.

Note The information in this article assumes that you are using a single floppy disk drive. If your computer has two or more floppy disk drives, this information applies only if you remove a disk from a floppy disk drive (for example, drive A) and insert another disk into the same disk drive.

Error messages that you may receive when you open a file

In Microsoft Excel, if you attempt to open a file from a floppy disk, you may receive the following error message: In this message, A is the floppy disk drive that you are trying to access, and pathname is the path and name of the file.

To determine the unique number that is associated with the message that you receive, press CTRL+SHIFT+I. The following number appears in the lower-right corner of this message:

Error messages that you may receive when you save a file

You open a file from a floppy disk, and then you insert a different floppy disk in the disk drive. When you attempt to save the file to the disk, you may receive one of the following error messages:

• Microsoft Excel cannot access the file 'A:\pathname. There are several possible reasons:
  
  * The file name or path name does not exist.
  * The file you're trying to open is being used by another program. Close the document in the other program, and try again.
  * The name of the workbook you're trying to save is the same as the name of another document that is read-only. Try saving the workbook with a different name.
  In this message, A is your computer's floppy disk drive, and pathname is the path and name of the file.
  
  To determine the unique number that is associated with the message that you receive, press CTRL+SHIFT+I. The following number appears in the lower-right corner of this message:
  100099
• ERROR Reading Disk in Drive A: Please Insert disklabel With Serial Number serialnumber in Drive A:
  In this message, A is your computer's floppy disk drive, disklabel is the label of the floppy disk, and serialnumber is the serial number of the floppy disk.

You may receive the first error message that is mentioned in the "Symptoms" section when you try to open a file if the second floppy disk does not contain the file that you are trying to access, or if the pathname for the file is incorrect. This problem most commonly occurs when you are using the list of recently used files.

You may receive the second error message when you save the file, and when the original path of the file does not exist on the second floppy disk.

The third error message appears because Excel requires file sharing. The error message occurs because of the way in which the file-sharing program keeps track of open files. When you open a file from a floppy disk, the serial number (if one exists) of the floppy disk (for example, 2B4A-1ACA), is read into memory. If you attempt to save an open file to a floppy disk that has a different serial number than the floppy disk it was opened from, you may receive the error message.

A disk formatted with the Format command included with Microsoft operating systems DOS 5 or later will contain serial numbers.

Note This error message will not appear if the floppy disks do not have serial numbers.

To work around this issue, copy the files to your hard disk before you open them.

This is the recommended workaround because opening files from and saving files to the hard disk drive is faster than using a floppy disk drive. Additionally, saving to the hard disk drive allows you to avoid problems caused by lack of space on floppy disks.

To avoid receiving an error message when you save a file to a floppy disk, use the Save As command instead of the Save command.