windows 7 crashes when trying to formate floppy disk

I figured the DOS program wasn’t being recognized on my Dell for some reason, so I went back to my work PC today and recreated the boot disk. I made the backup DOS boot disk two nights ago, but when I got home and tried to load it I got the following error:

I’m 99% there…I just need to get over this one last hurdle!

In short, I can get the A: prompt, but I cannot get it to recognize my C drive. Through research, the easiest way to do this seems to be to format a floppy disk and make a DOS backup. When I open windows, my PC crashes before I have time for options. All scenarios worked previously.I need to get into my C drive to rename a corrupted Windows file. I have replicated the same symptoms on 2 units, one old and one new on two different desktops running Windows 95 and ME on the floppy header and on a usb-floppy adapter connected to a Windows 10 laptop. I noticed the generated images are larger than before (4,117KB as opposed to 3,921KB) but I guess that's to do with new things that have been added in the last 2 years. This isn't anything complicated, just standard 1.44MB floppy images in HFE format, generated by the current version of the windows application. I can't format any disk, and on occasion the gotek crashes completely so the buttons don't respond and if I pull the memory stick, it doesn't revert to hxc on the display. Now, I can read from images no problem, but try to write anything back, and I get a plethora of errors from DOS or Windows. This week I got a third gotek unit, happy with my previous experience, I again bought and put hxc firmware on it, but this time updated to firmware HXCFEUSB_V3_1_23_1a.UPD A couple of years ago, I got 2 gotek floppy emulators, bought and put hxc firmware on them, got on really well with them with no issues.

Windows 7 crashes when trying to formate floppy disk