The Floppy Drive Powers On But does not Function

[hen555]

My dad needed a floppy drive to backup his stuff and I dont know whats wrong.

I took out this floppy drive from my oldest pc and it has no face or cover on it so it looks ugly in my case. I dont even know the brand of it but lets get to the problem. The light comes on in the floppy and power is supplied but is it connected to my MB? I took out the old floppy wire from the old mb and it was the one with te "twist" in it , I connected that from my motherboard where on the book it read floppy but it didnt show which way i was supposed to insert it... there was no clip lock to even tell so I just put it in a way where the wires were easier.

I run my windows 7 go to computer its not there...ok
I go to bios and theres a floppy setting, it asks me which floppy drive am I useing... I choose the 3.5" 1.44mb one. ( I tried all of the other 3.5' and still no work) . And no it didnt work. When I mean it didnt work, I mean it shows it in mycomputer but when I insert the floppy disk, it does open nor can I even open it. It just keeps saying "Please insert floppy disk".


I was thinking about just getting a usb to floppy thing but if u guys can help me with this will be much appreciated.

[sswilson]

Is the power light on solid? If so then the cable is on backwards.

[hen555]

ya power light is green solid no flickering or anything.

So I just have to switch it the other way?

thanks

[MarkOne]

what is a floppy drive ???..... SS give you the right anwser, but for know the next time, on the flat cable you have on the side a very thin red line red ( may be blue ) color, that's the pint 1 , you align it with the 1 printed on the board, sometime it's the head of an arrow printed instead.

[hen555]

ohh okay Now I have switch around the cable connected to my motherboard and now my floppy drive seems to be operating normally.

But comes another problem.
I put in floppy disk and it asks to format, i click format and then... "Windows explorer has stopped working"

Any ideas on that?'
Is my cable pushed in all the way because when I was putting it in I thought it was all the way in but i didnt want to force any harder to damage the motherbaord.

[hen555]

I put in another disk and it actually works, can go in and copy files etc.
but this 1 disk which is not formated cant format. same disk company and both unlocked to write

Maybe its the disk?
but thanks alot for atleast making it work now!

[Zero82z]

Originally Posted by hen555

Maybe its the disk?

Most likely. Floppies were never a particularly reliable storage medium.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by hen555

I put in another disk and it actually works, can go in and copy files etc.
but this 1 disk which is not formated cant format. same disk company and both unlocked to write

Maybe its the disk?
but thanks alot for atleast making it work now!

3.5 floppies were and are notorious for failing very easily. It didn't take much for them to become ruined or useless.

[LionRed]

Buy your dad a thumb drive for Christmas

[Perineum]

3.5 inch disks on my Amiga formatted to 1.78 capacity and worked forever, it was really really really rare to have a failure. When I started using a PC a lot more I was astounded as to how easily they fail.....