Trouble installing a 5.25" disk drive

[Patrik Spånning Westerlund]

I have installed a 5.25" floppy disk drive in my computer, but I cannot get
it to work properly, and I hope someone can give me some advice. The disk
drive appears as drive B: in "My Computer", but when I try to read a floppy
disk, I get a message saying that B: is not accessible, because there is
something wrong with an I/O unit.

I have checked the BIOS settings and the cable. The mainboard is supposed to
support 5.25" disk drives. My computer is an AMD Athlon and I use Windows XP
Home Edition.

Could anyone please give me some advice on what to do!

/Patrik

 

[Vanguard]

I have installed a 5.25" floppy disk drive in my computer, but I
cannot get it to work properly, and I hope someone can give me some
advice. The disk drive appears as drive B: in "My Computer", but when
I try to read a floppy disk, I get a message saying that B: is not
accessible, because there is something wrong with an I/O unit.

I have checked the BIOS settings and the cable. The mainboard is
supposed to support 5.25" disk drives. My computer is an AMD Athlon
and I use Windows XP Home Edition.

Could anyone please give me some advice on what to do!

/Patrik

Move the ribbon cable connector you used for the B: drive onto your
3.5-inch drive (so your A: drive becomes your B: drive, and you have no
A: drive). Can you use the 3.5-inch floppy drive okay as B:? If not,
you have a hardware problem which mostly points to the cable since the
drive worked okay when it was on the other connector and was using the
same hardware. If the 3.5-inch drive works as B:, I'd suspect your
5.25-inch drive is dysfunctional, presuming you didn't slide in the
connector backwards (some cables use polarized connectors that have a
nub in the middle that will match with a slot in the shell on the
drive's connector, while some go cheap and use symmetrical connectors
without the nub).

 

[Patrik Spånning Westerlund]

supposed Windows

Are you positive that the 5.25" drive itself is in working order?

It worked fine in my old computer, I used it last October without any
problems.