I have an old 586/Win95 I want to install a 5.25 floppy drive in as a legacy machine. I found a couple drives for free at a local computer store: literally in a "free salvage pile" of assorted 3-4-586 components. The two drives are different brands/models- one is a Teac FD-55GFR, the other is a Panasonic JU-475-5 -or possibly- JU-475-5 AKJ. Both appear mechanically intact; the Panasonic is missing one jumper that I replaced. I can not find any info on if the jumpers on either drive need to be configured any particular way.
- I tried one drive and when it failed I obtained the other; I tried them in the 586-PC as well as a ~4-yr old Acer Aspire running a Acer proprietary mobo/PII 350/Win98, as well as my current T-Bird 1200/Asus A7A266/Win98SE. In all three computers, both drives do exactly the same thing: they appear to boot properly (light comes on, drive looks for disk, light goes off). The "5 1/4" icon shows up in all OS's under "my computer", but the drive always spins: if I slide a disk inside it, I can hear the spindle rubbing against the disk. If I try to access the drive at all (with a disk locked in it or empty), all three computers hang for 30-45 seconds, then give a "drive busy/retry/cancel" message.
- The older two computers have very poor BIOS programs that don't let you manually assign floppies. The Asus BIOS allows assigning a floppy to a letter, but it still suffers the exact same malfunction as the other two PC's.
- The 586 computer had a floppy ribbon cable with both style of connectors on it, but the other two newer PC's didn't. The shop gave me a free cable also, that had both types of drive connectors on it. Both cables function with 3.5 drives; I can put a 3.5 floppy on either position of either cable and it works properly but both the 5.25's fail, on both cables and on both positions.
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- I can return to the shop and look for a drive still inside a case and take that, but the two drives I already have failing *identically* makes me wonder if it's not my error. I am supposing that either I am doing something wrong, or that the drives were already removed because they didn't work. Is this a common way for 5.25 floppy drives to fail? - DougC
- I tried one drive and when it failed I obtained the other; I tried them in the 586-PC as well as a ~4-yr old Acer Aspire running a Acer proprietary mobo/PII 350/Win98, as well as my current T-Bird 1200/Asus A7A266/Win98SE. In all three computers, both drives do exactly the same thing: they appear to boot properly (light comes on, drive looks for disk, light goes off). The "5 1/4" icon shows up in all OS's under "my computer", but the drive always spins: if I slide a disk inside it, I can hear the spindle rubbing against the disk. If I try to access the drive at all (with a disk locked in it or empty), all three computers hang for 30-45 seconds, then give a "drive busy/retry/cancel" message.
- The older two computers have very poor BIOS programs that don't let you manually assign floppies. The Asus BIOS allows assigning a floppy to a letter, but it still suffers the exact same malfunction as the other two PC's.
- The 586 computer had a floppy ribbon cable with both style of connectors on it, but the other two newer PC's didn't. The shop gave me a free cable also, that had both types of drive connectors on it. Both cables function with 3.5 drives; I can put a 3.5 floppy on either position of either cable and it works properly but both the 5.25's fail, on both cables and on both positions.
~
- I can return to the shop and look for a drive still inside a case and take that, but the two drives I already have failing *identically* makes me wonder if it's not my error. I am supposing that either I am doing something wrong, or that the drives were already removed because they didn't work. Is this a common way for 5.25 floppy drives to fail? - DougC
All advice here is free.</font color=blue> 
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