NerveRacking Floppy drive

I recently put togethor a computer with the following specs.... Asus A7A 266fsb, 1.333/266 athlon, 256ddr mem, gforce2ultra, sblivemp3+5.1, etcetcetc... I thought everything would be great, perfect, but then it happened.
Floppy disk failure(40)... I think it said floppy failure (80) on first boot. What the hell? It turned out I had my floppy cable on backwards. No problem, I got a new floppy and new cable. This time it was on the right way FOR SURE. Power cable is fine. I boot up and I still get the problem ff(40). For a while my disk drive was read as a removable disk. This later changed for some reason. Everytime I go to read a disk now it either, a)locks up or b) insert a formatted disk... What is the problem? I am using award bios. Any suggestions ????
btw.... It said something like floppy disk enabled in ms-dos mode... I cannot remember where I seen that but I do recall the message.