Floppy drive access

[al_capp]

Somewhere between the time I bought this Dell, and now the floppy drive
became unaccessible. At first I thought it might be the disk. but I refuse
to believe all 300 or so are corrupted.
So I began trading out floppy drives. After a number of them produced the
same problem, I came to the conclusion that the problem probably lies with
XP.
This system came with XP home installed on it as well as coming with a
floppy drive installed and working.
I've been through the help files, and have read about disciptor bits, and
bugs being repaired with SP2.

I took out a disposable floppy, and attempted to format it as to see if the
problem was disciptor bit in nature. neither in XP floppy properties, nor in
dos window can I format successfully. The disk utilities I've tired do not
recognize their is a floppy even in there. Under properties, all floppys
show they have a RAW file system.

I have installed SP2, and nothing has changed.
This would not be so big a deal if it weren't for this collection of
software, I would like to save (dos ver 1.0 to present, old bbs propgrams,
etc).

Would it be easier to setup a second machine on the LAN and leave it fat
based, or is there something I have missed?

 

[Vanguard]

Somewhere between the time I bought this Dell, and now the floppy drive
became unaccessible. At first I thought it might be the disk. but I
refuse to believe all 300 or so are corrupted.
So I began trading out floppy drives. After a number of them produced the
same problem, I came to the conclusion that the problem probably lies with
XP.
This system came with XP home installed on it as well as coming with a
floppy drive installed and working.
I've been through the help files, and have read about disciptor bits, and
bugs being repaired with SP2.

I took out a disposable floppy, and attempted to format it as to see if
the problem was disciptor bit in nature. neither in XP floppy properties,
nor in dos window can I format successfully. The disk utilities I've tired
do not recognize their is a floppy even in there. Under properties, all
floppys show they have a RAW file system.

I have installed SP2, and nothing has changed.
This would not be so big a deal if it weren't for this collection of
software, I would like to save (dos ver 1.0 to present, old bbs propgrams,
etc).

Would it be easier to setup a second machine on the LAN and leave it fat
based, or is there something I have missed?

When you attempt to access the floppy drive, does its LED light up? When
you power up, does its LED light up momentarily (when the reset is sent to
it on power up)? If you configure the boot drive sequence in BIOS to use
the floppy drive first, does the BIOS attempt to access the floppy drive (so
it can get an OS to boot from that floppy)? Is the LED on the floppy drive
on all the time? Does the LED ever light up?

Did you check if the cable is properly oriented so pin 1 of the floppy
drive's data connector goes to pin 1 on the motherboard header for the
floppy controller? Are you sure the data cable from the floppy drive is
going to the correct header cable on the motherboard? Have you tried
replacing the data cable for the floppy drive since it could be bad? Have
you checked that the floppy drive is even connected to a power tap from the
power supply?