At 04:51 PM 12/14/2000, you wrote:
>   Recently I was helping out an older friend of mine.  He has a number of
>old 5 1/4" disks with some favorite older programs and managed to find
>himself an external drive to read them.  This drive is an old IBM external
>with a ribbon cable that connects to the motherboard, with a connector to go
>to the existing drive.
>
>   The person he got the drive from tested it, as well as his brother, and
>both said that it worked.  But when we tried installing it the computer
>would not read the 5 1/4, nor the 3 1/2 after that.  The lights came on, but
>an "Abort, Retry, Ignore" error came up.  I of course had changed the BIOS
>settings when the computer booted to show the new drive.  I tried playing
>with the cables still with no luck.  After connecting the original ribbon
>cable back again and setting the BIOS back to a single drive everything
>worked as normal.
>
>   I brought the 5 1/4 drive home and hooked it up to an older computer I
>have laying around and it worked perfectly fine, reading an old disk.  Also,
>the existing floppy worked fine.  I took it back to his Pavilion and hooked
>it up with the same negative results.
>
>   Is there a special floppy that these computers use, or does something
>special have to be done?  Why would this drive work fine on other computers
>(three of them) but not on this Hewlett Packard Pavilion?

I would visit HP's web site and check on a Bios upgrade.  It might
well be that the original Bios had an error as it applies to your
drive.  That would seem to be the only option left to you based
on your report of all that you have tried.

    Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group

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