Dan,

It was always set to seek the floppy on boot, and although the LED on the
drive lights up during the boot, it does not try to boot from the Win 98
startup disk.  It was originally set to boot in this order: A, C, F(zip
drive). I changed that to Zip, C,E(CDROM).  I tried the swap floppy enabled
and got a "drive failure (40)" message during POST, which is where the boot
stopped. I diabled that and still got a "drive failure (40)" message during
POST.  I then changed the boot sequence A,C,F, and it booted up OK.  The IT
guy at my office thinks I may just have to break down, fdisk, reformat and
reinstall. He thinks it's a problem with Win 98, not a hardware problem.  He
thinks that because when I right-click on A in "my computer" I don't get any
context menu, and when I left-click it just locks up the application.  I
don't get even "A is not ready, retry/cancel".  I do get that message in
Explorer, but he thinks Win 98 is screwed up.

In answer to your last sentence, it will not boot from the floppy, the LED
lights up and then it goes on to boot from C. Joel

Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] A drive doesn't work


Joel....is it possible to take the floppy drive and move it to another
computer and see if it works there?  Also, you said that you tried to
boot off the disk and it just bypassed it...what are your settings in
the bios for booting?  Make it boot from the floppy, I'd like to hear
what happens.

Dan Duffy




For unknown reasons I cannot access my A drive.  I get the message that "A
drive is not ready".  I have a disk in it, but it will not display.  It
isn't the drive because I bought a new one and had the same problem.  I
bought a new cable and that didn't help.  It shows up as working in device
manager in Windows and in safe mode.  The BIOS displays it during the boot.
I checked to make sure the cable was pin 1 to pin 1.  If it were the cable
or the connection the BIOS would show "drive failure".  The only thing I can
think of now is that the mobo connector died, but I would think that would
give me a message "drive failure" during the boot.  If it isn't the drive or
the cable or the connection, or the mobo, what is left to check?  Any ideas
will be investigated.  Thanks, Joel

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com