Well from your original message I did not see where you said that the
system looked at the A: you said that the system froze.  Does the light
ever come on? I am going to assume that it does and I am then going to have
to assume that the connection point on the MB or controller card is bad
again I don't recall you mentioning weather or not this was onboard or not.
 as a last resort you could hook this drive up as a slave to another IDE
drive use FDISK to make the partition a primary partition and then format
is with the /s command and then place it back in the machine and go on your
way. This method will work until you have a need to boot to floppy for what
ever reason. this really sounds like a broken contact on the MB to me. Have
you tried the freezing floppy drive on another machine? I had a friend that
I helped (supervised) put in a new larger HD and when we are done he was
having problems with the floppy and it was because the cable was loose. ( I
know you have already done this check) I hope this helps at least a little bit.

Brian

>removed everything but video card, RAM, keyboard, floppy drive
>replaced floppy drive ribbon cable
>ensured 'red trace' at #1 pin--both ends fo ribbon cable
>replaced floppy drive
>tried numerous 'proven' bootable floppy disks
>
>The stinker is this:  the A drive reads perfectly in NT, or in the
>NT/DOS shell, and it performs, reading any file on the floppy.
>
>It just won't boot.
>
>driving me nuts sooner that I deserve
>
>suggestions....please....?

[Brian Coe]
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