Floppy drive woes

[shane25119]

Hello all,
I was using my Windows computer hooked up to my Linux hard drive to install suse, after i was done i put everything back together and went to boot, i got a little hiss sound, and then the machine woulnd't start, the red light on the board would come on though.... I diagnosed this as being related to my floppy drive in the end, its not that I use my floppy drive much (USB Flash all the way) but i would like to have it back. The offending set up was having it set on the same power cords as the Hard drive.

any help is welcome
shane

 

[mcall]

If I understand you correctly, prob only occurs when power connected to floppy drive. Things that could be causing problem:

1) floppy cable not seated properly: disconnect cable from floppy and MB and reconnect
2) NVRAM corrupted: boot to BIOS. Current generation MBs have an option in BIOS to clear NVRAM. Usually will say something like "Clear/reset PNP Y/N). Location in BIOS varies but usually in same area you configure MB devices. Older MB's, you will need to look for jumper reset.
3) P/S wattage limitation: you indicated connecting another HD but not if you removed it. You may have exceeded you P/S wattage: will need larger P/S. You can test by disconnecting power to another peripheral (CDROM/HD) and connecting pwr to floppy.
4) P/S connector to floppy bad: usually, P/S have 2 or more connectors for floppy. Try one the others.
5) floppy drive bad: generally this will produce error that no a: drive found but have seen weirder things: replace drive
6) P/S bad: if above items no fix, then P/S bad and needs to be replaced.

I listed items in order of how I would t/s problem. If you don't have spare parts laying around and trying to decide whether to to 5 or 6, do 6.

 

[edfair]

Generally the little hiss has to do with chips on the drive controller overheating because the power cable was plugged in wrong. (Don't ask how I know)
Ususally the floppy is history at the point you hear the hissing.

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

 

[BadBigBen]

Edfair - all I say is TRIAL AND ERROR!... know what you mean... *G

shane - follow the good advice given sofar... like edfair says, floppy is mostlikely toast (you can test it in another box) but they are cheap nowadays ($10 or so)...

Ben

 

[micker377]

Agree with edfair - now I use a powerful flashlight to be sure I put that hard to reach floppy power plug on correctly!!

 

[mcall]

haven't run into "hiss" before. Will have to keep that in mind.

 

[shane25119]

ahhh hell... I've got like 4 floppies laying around... problem is all of them are broken.... I guess I can just live off of my CD-RW drive and my flash memory drive... its not like XP uses floppies for anything much.... and as for my other box (SuSe Linux)... its had it in for floppies ever since i switched power supplies :-/

shane

 

[micker377]

The "hiss" is small resistors on the floppy board going "poof". If you check real quick, you can see the smoke.

 

[BadBigBen]

micker - lol...

Ben