At 09:04 PM 10/05/1999 , you wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>I have been working on a system that will not read from the floppy drive.
>When I try to access the drive, I get an unfamiliar reading noise followed
>by a "not ready reading drive A" prompt. I swapped the drive with a new one
>and when I try to access it, I have the system freeze up! I even tried  a
>new ribbon cable with each floppy drive(both old drive and new). System
>seems to be very slow when I double click on icons with the new replacement
>drive. The system has a 6.4GB Hard drive as primary master, CD-ROM is
>secondary master, and the floppy cable serves a Seagate backup drive (middle
>connector) and the floppy drive is connected off the end of the cable. When
>I try to remove drives or controllers through Device Manager, so that
>windows can rebuild at restart, again, things freeze up. Maybe the system
>resources are taxed to the limit? All responses greatly acknowledged!
>Thanks everyone.
>Jim.

As Rick mentioned earlier, try disconnecting the tape drive from the
floppy ribbon cable first.

One thing I am confused about here, you mentioned the floppy is on
the end connector.  You did not mention if it was the connector just
after the twist in the floppy cable?  Your floppy drive needs to be on
this connector.  The tape drive may or may not be going bad, but
it would be best to try the system without the tape drive first.  You
can always add it back in later.    If this is the issue, you can get
a highspeed controller card to fit into a ISA or PCI slot from Seagate
for the tape drive, taking it off the floppy drive cable.

Another thought is to replace the ribbon cable...  it may be going bad.

If the floppy drive is installed properly, power cable and ribbon cable
connected properly, (check to see if the have the data ribbon cable
reversed on the connector), then at POST, that first phase when you
power up and it read the memory and drives...  the floppy drive light
should come on for a few seconds.  If it does not or stays on all the
time, try reversing the ribbon data cable on the back of the floppy drive.

Be sure the CMOS settings are proper for the drive, if the CMOS has
been change to 1.2mg from 1.44mg this also can occur.




                 Bob Wright
        The NOSPIN Group, Inc
http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org

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