Floppy drive weird behaviour. Hoary.

[Jenny Drake]

For the first time in ages I've needed to write to floppy disks. 
The same behaviour seems to be happening on any disk I try. 
Insert disk, it automounts OK and an icon appears to open on the
desktop.
Open the icon and I sometimes get a couple of items in it and a free
space of 396KB. If I try and delete them I get 0 items and a free space
of 0KB, including if I delete the .Trash folder created on the disk. The
same thing happens if I try this from a shell. If I do seemingly manage
to copy another file to the floppy it isn't there the next time I put it
in the drive. I need to send a small amount of data to a friend with a
poor internet connection and Windows 2000. I can't find my keyring drive
(object is too small, house is too messy!) and it seems a waste to burn
a CD for a couple of MB. 

This has not been a problem on other distributions.

Where do I start looking for what is wrong? Any clues? Some of these
floppies have been used as boot disks in the past, but the problem isn't
limited to them. Do they need to be reformated as Dos disks? If so how?
The mkdosfs man page assumes a level of competence I don't have. 

Thanks for any help.

Jen

-- 
"On a planet of peril she dared to defy its evil rulers."