Unable to write designs to this drive.

In addition to checking your floppy disc, you might check and see if it uses VIP format, I have a Designer II and it uses both!

You should not have to have a floppy disk driver as the machine (IBM format) recognizes the floppy drive upon boot up. Go into your BIOS setup and be sure that the floppy drive is turned on. It is always recognized as Drive A: or Drive B: Those two designations is reserved for floppy drives in the Basic Input Output System, reguardless if your machine came with an attached FloppyDrive.

What worked for me was to not put the disk in the drive until I was ready to write to it. Sometimes this would be enough to make Disk Manager find the disk. If it didn't, I would re-format the disk. Re-formatting seemed to force the software to go look for the disk. This worked for me because I did not store all my designs on floppies. I only used the floppy to load what I was going to be embroidering out at that time. All my designs are stored on the hard drive which is backed up regularly, and are readily accessible for writing to the media I use for my D.1.

Your Designer 1 will read none of the file formats you listed. It uses .shv which is a special file type created just for the Designer 1. Some embroidery sellers offer this format, but most do not. You don't need the .shv if you have the 4D software. When you purchase designs, you can buy almost any format you want and your software will deal with it. Most Husqvarna Designer owners purchase designs in .vp3 or .pes format. Avoid .art designs.

You need to set up your software using the Configure module. You can access this either by locating your 4D software folder on your hard drive - in that folder there should be an .exe called Configure - or use a link in your normal 4D screen once you open the program. Look for the icon along the top that looks like a screwdriver and pliers (or something like that). In Configure use the Send 1 tab to tell your software that you have a floppy disk Designer 1.

When you want to load designs for your sewing machine, open 4D Disk Manager (it will be in the drop-down Accessories box using the arrow beside the Configure button). You need to have the correctly formatted floppy disk in your computer's floppy disk drive. If you don't have one, you can format a blank one from within the Disk Manager module. Most importantly if you are using a floppy that already has been used in your Designer 1, you need to use the Read Disk icon along the top. The designs already on your floppy are read into the program. You can then add whatever designs you want by using the Open (icon showing an open manilla folder) or View (looks like a blue camera) buttons. Then you choose the Write Disk button to put not only your newly added designs on the floppy disk, but to also put back the ones that were already on it. Click "Yes" when asked if you want to erase designs already on the disk. It is quite safe provided you read the disk into Disk Manager first, as described above.

Does your model use floppies, direct connect cable or flash drive (thumb drive).

Are the designs unzipped?

Are the designs in the correct format?

You can get the floppy drive replaced. I did tons of them! I don't think it is you. Sometimes you can "wiggle" the floppy a bit with the little flap door open and get it to read. Not a huge deal to replace.

Solution 1.
Try using the Installation CD or Utiltity CD that came with your drive to format it.

If theres a Utility CD then install it on your computer and try formating it from the utility application.

If the windows error messages still persist then try formating it with the windows default options or NTFS option.

The disk may have unrecoverable formatting errors making it useless. Or your hardware could be on the failure.

If you absolutely must , try purchasing or borrowing an external floppy drive and try to save the information to the disk on the external drive. If if formats and works then you know your internal floppy drive is bad.

If it has the same problems as formatting it in your internal drive, then the floppy itself is bad.

If I may suggest , in the future it would be wiser to save all your data to a removable USB Flash Drive. They are very very inexpensive and cost a lot less then a box of floppies :)

I am pretty sure you can download Disk 100 free from the Husqvarna Viking website. This has all the embroideries that came free with the machine, plus the alphabets (I think!). You can download this direct to your PC or to a set of floppies, depending on what your Designer needs and what support software you have (or have not) got. If you have no Husqvarna software at all, your PC will not be able to read the floppy. It is in .shv format which PCs are unable to read, being an embroidery machine language only.
If you are trying to open the faulty disk in your Disk Manager software, I always found it worked better if I didn't put the disk in the floppy drive of the computer until after I had already opened Disk Manager.
Hope some of the above is useful to you.

Sounds like you have a bad floppy drive. If you are unable to read a disk and it wants to format it so it can read it try letting it format a floppy with no data on it or with floppy you don't care about. If it can format and you can read and write to it, then bad disks. If not then you know you have a bad floppy drive. Replace and enjoy.