Floppy drive won't detect!

[Guest]

I spent about 5 hours last night building my system (first time). Here's my setup:

MSI K7 Master
1.33 GHz Athlon
256 MB DDR Ram
ATI Rage Fury
Pioneer DVD-Rom
Some generic CD-RW burner

When I boot the first time, the BIOS is able to detect my DVD/CD Roms and harddrive alright, but it keeps giving me an error about my floppy (something like this):

Floppy(s) Fail (80)

Because of this, I can't boot off floppy to install my OS (Win 98 SE). I did notice my BIOS seems to be 1.0 but I won't be able to flash it to v1.1 if I can't even read the floppy drive. Can anyone please tell me what's wrong?

Darth

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[jlanka]

stupid question: Is the cable reversed?

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[Guest]

That's what I thought at first so I reversed my ribbon and still no dice. Oh ya, I forgot to mention that the floppy drive light stays on (no flashes or anything). Any other suggestions?

Darth

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[camieabz]

Usually this means the cables are set up wrongly.
Double check them, making sure the red stripe along the cable is at pin 1, and make sure the cable is aligned correctly. I've done this one before. The cable seems on, but the last two pins have been missed. Failing that, double check the mobo end.

<b>
"Now drop your weapons or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly baby."
</b>

 

[girish]

that means the cable is set up wrong. what drive do you have? some drives dont have the box around the connector so its possible to plug the cable either way. those usually have a smal embossed arrow pointing pin 1. align the red wire on the cable to that arrow. or there are pin numbers written on the PCB silk screen if its exposed, marking both pin 1 as wel as pin 34. some drives like sony (the ones we get here) have a box around the connector and the tab is put on the wrong side. you need to plug the cable the wrong way to get it work.

if there is no box around the connector on the drive then you might have misaligned the cable, make sure you put teh cable the right way and on the right number of pins

girish

<font color=blue>die-hard fans don't have heat-sinks!</font color=blue>

 

[Guest]

I don't know what brand the floppy drive is, but it looks like I got pin 1 messed up. There's only one way to connect the cable on the FDD (if you have a tabbed cable) so I thought I had it right. I tried another floppy ribbon without tabs and it works now.

Thanks for all the help.

Darth

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This space for lease.

 

[Ncogneto]

They actually did make floppy ribbon cables with tabs that had pin one reversed.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!