On 8 Sep 2005 at 20:46, Dianne wrote:
 > The light on the a drive is on all the time when it is connected.

When checking out your motherboard by disconnecting the floppy
drive from the cable, I'd suggest that you NOT leave the floppy cable
plugged into the motherboard...even though the other end of the cable
is unattached. Maybe there are electrical reflections bouncing back
from the end of the cable and tricking the motherboard. Or maybe
there's a nick in the edge of the cable, a sharp bend in the cable,
or a bad connection between the flexible cable and the plastic connectors,
such that the integrity of one of the wires in the cable is bad.
Or worse, maybe there's a short between two adjacent wires in the cable.
The result might trick the motherboard into thinking there's a drive
connected even when there isn't one. Hence the request for a boot diskette.

(I've had similar weird happenings with damaged SCSI hard drive cables.
So maybe it can happen with floppy cables.)

Your first few messages didn't make it clear to me whether the floppy
drive light was on constantly or not. So I was hesitant to reply to
the messages. As others have said, this usually means the floppy cable
is plugged in backwards...either where it's plugged into the drive or
where it's plugged into the motherboard. (Some motherboard sockets
are keyed in that they have a blocked hole to match the missing pin
in the cable's connector or have a slot on the side of the socket
that matches a nub on the cable's connector. But some motherboards
don't have these keys and would let you plug the cable in backwards.
Like David, I've never had a floppy drive survive even a few seconds
of being plugged in backwards. Worse case, maybe the motherboard floppy
controller circuitry could be damaged. I assume that you tried disabling
the floppy drive in the BIOS Setup. Maybe you could get the board
working with no floppy. You could probably live without a floppy.
(Boot from Windows CDROM, use a CDRW drive to make bootable CDs for
things like recovery disks.)

If you're having floppy problems, maybe your hard drives are okay. Don't
be too quick to mess them up be formatting them or reinstall windows
on the disk drives before you're sure.

Regards,
Bill

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