If the floppy light only lights briefly during boot-up, the data cable is
not securely attached, or a pin in a connector is bent.  If you had the
ribbon cable off, remove it and inspect the pins on the drive connection.
If the light never comes on, check the power connection.  If that seems to
be in order, boot the computer, and press del to enter cmos.  Go to the
basic setup screen, and set the floppy diskette 1.44 meg to 'present' or
'enabled'.  If you pressed the selection in CMOS setup for 'load default' or
'load BIOS' settings, sometimes the floppy is disabled.  I think this is a
low-tech anti-virus solution, but I have a couple systems that do this.

If the light stays on, or is on with no accompanying noise, the data cable
is twisted a half turn, remove one end, turn it 180 degrees and reconnect
it.

If the diskette drive is really arc-welded into junk, the power supply
typically will not come on at all.  Power supplies have some magic in them
so if they sense no load or an 'off the scale' load when starting, they
clamp down.
In my experience, you won't even get a beep out of them, and the fan won't
even come on, if there is a major short somewhere.  So it is probably worth
trying a couple things before you run out and buy a new diskette drive,
since it is not yet obvious that the old one is dead.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: John Chin [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 1:04 AM

At 11:00 AM 04/04/2001 Catherine Williamson  wrote:
>I can't boot with a floppy coz the floppy won't work
>tho it worked before the power supply burnt up. So
>I can't get to DOS. . . .
>Is there some other way to install Windows?
>Catherine

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml