Discette drive will not format a discette

Hi,
After thinking about the error message reported in my last post, I tried formatting the discettes again on the the Dell laptop I'm using.
I opened a discette utility menu with a right click on the 3 1/2 discette drive in My Computer. Clicking on Format opened a dialogue box giving some options. None of the option boxes appeared to do anything when clicked.
I then clicked on the Start and then on OK button in the next dialogue box, which should have started the format operation. The system did not perform a format, and did not it give an error message.
I've tried this with two different external discete drives so coming to the conclusion that a operating system program is missing - which may have been the source of the problem originally reported with th Win2K boot disk program downloaded from SysChat.