Floppy (A:) drive problems

[Jamezuva]

Ok, my A: floppy drive has never worked since I got it a few months ago. About all I know is that the BIOS seems to recognize it and it gets listed among all my drives in windows. However, when I try to use it and put a floppy disk in, the disk is not recognized as being there and it'll continue to want me to put in a floppy. Is this a driver problem, cable problem, or is the drive itself whacked? I have a Asusk7m and am running win2k.

 

[potac]

Make sure that the cable is not upsidedown and also try using a different cable if that doesn't work. I had this same problem and it turned out to be [cough cough] the first thing I said.

 

[dszd0g]

I think this could be a lot of things. My guess is it is most likely either the cable or the drive itself. I had an external SCSI cable once that would see the tape drive but I could not read/write/rewind etc. it.

I would recommend swapping cables, see if that fixes it.
Swap it into a different system and eliminate the possibility of OS or motherboard issues.

Just to double check this is a normal, 1.44MB floppy drive and not one of the odd products on the market that requires drivers? My guess would be if it was one of those odd products Windows would not see it, but just double checking.

At that point if it isn't a cable problem, isn't a motherboard/BIOS problem, isn't an OS/driver problem, it must be the drive itself.

 

[Jamezuva]

Yup, just a plain 1.44mb floppy as far as I can tell. Thanks for the suggestions...hopefully I can figure it out

 

[Dufusyte]

I vote for the cable being upside down. Unplug the cable where it plugs into the floppy drive and flip it. Btw, make sure you have a good floppy disk when you go to test it. You may have fried the floppy disk with the reversed cable, and so it will report that the thing is unreadable.

 

[dszd0g]

Yeah, I assumed he checked the cable was going the correct direction. However, hopefully my first step of swapping cables would have caught that one.

I have never heard of having the floppy cable reversed damaging anything. I have made that mistake a couple of times by accident (working on computers at 2:00am type stuff...) and all that happens is that it doesn't work and on most drives the LED is always on when the cable is reversed.