Hi Larry,
If you reformatted the hard disk then I assume the system is completely
dead now, unable to boot at all.  Assuming also that there are no CMOS
settings to enable, this leads me to believe you are dealing with an older
system that has no On Board IDE, but is using an adapter card for the IDE
hard disk controller / floppy disk controller.  On the adapter you should
find either jumpers that will enable the floppy diskette drives or, a BIOS
chip.  If you have a BIOS on the controller, especially old VESA local bus
controllers, you should be able to enter its setup by pressing a function
key.  Things could be worse.  My old 486 IDE adapters allow you to disable
display of the boot up help message that tells you what key to press to
enter Disk controller BIOS.  If that's the case, or if the BIOS is password
protected, I would invest in a new adapter, they are cheap enough for the
basic variety.
Tom Turak
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Larry wrote:

I've run into a couple of machines where I can't access the floppy
drives.  The drives are connected properly and they function properly in
other machines.  The problem seems to be something done on/to the hard
drives that makes the floppies inaccessible for (probably) security
reasons.
Reformatting works on some systems, and repartitioning works on others,
but on some, neither of these techniques, nor anything else I've tried
allows us to access the floppies.  The CMOS does not have an option for
floppy boot, etc.

Larry Atlow
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