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?

Marc

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