Floppy Drive Unrecognized

[hoonmihnfao]

I have an Abit TH7-RAID motherboard, and I am unable to get the floppy drive working. It is connected, and I set the BIOS to recognize one floppy drive.

However, when I boot up, the light does not come on and when I put a disk inside and try to access the disk's contents, WinXP tells me that I need to insert a disk into floppy A.

I have tried this with several different floppys, so I know it's not the drive itself.

Any ideas, or is there any information that I can offer that might give a clue?

Thanks.

Greg

 

[pmonett]

Try turning the data cable the other way.
I have often found that floppy unit makers do not always respect specifications for placing the connecter header. Thus, you plug the data cable with red pin toward the power connector, and it doesn't work.
Currently, on one my three home PCs, the data cable is plugged red pin AWAY from the power connector - and it only works that way.

Pascal.

 

[hoonmihnfao]

I tried reversing the cable, and the floppy light shines perpetually, but I get the same result "insert disk...".

I've tried reinstalling everything, I've check the BIOS settings, I've checked the power and data cables--is there something I'm missing here?

My BIOS has a setting that allows it to test a floppy drive to determine if it is a 40 or 80 pin drive; however, when I run this test at startup I get the messaged "floppy failed(40)", which would indicate that the drive is not recognized at the BIOS level, so is there something else I can do to resolve this problem?

Thank you,

Greg

 

[edfair]

Is the drive plugged on the end of the cable. And is the cut and twist closest to the drive rather than the M/B?

Both ends plugged in fully?

Can be a controller error on the M/B. But if you select "seek on boot" in the BIOS and have the controller enabled in the BIOS you should get the drive select lite at least.

When you reversed the cable you got the expected select lite. You put 0 volts on the drive select pin.

If your ribbon connector doesn't have polarity guides You can also plug the cable wrong on both ends and get this problem.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.