Floppy disk controller problem?

[Uranium-235]

I'm getting a comptuer setup for a friend for her birthday (made from my uncles old computer parts). When I connect the floppy cable, the light stays on, of coruse (duh) this is the obvious problem of the cable needing to be turned around, but when I turn it around, it dosen't do anything, no light at all, and bios gives me floppy error. I tried 2 different cables, and two different floppy drives. I get the same problem. Is the floppy controller just messed up?

I also removed the cmos battery to see if resetting the bios would do it. and no dice

[Jason425]

flip it on the other side of the cable... either side can cause a problem

[Dragon]

yeah.. and wtf is a floppy?

[Jason425]

I don't know.. I think they had em back in the ice age...

[vee_ess]

Ironically some motherboards from the last generation require a floppy drive to be present. Uranium, is the motherboard that you are using possibly one of those?

[Uranium-235]

well, it's really reccomended, this family has alot of old computers and they use floppies alot, this is just a 700MHZ AMD (SLOT A). I know it's possible to boot from CD and install the OS, but it really needs a floppy drive

ok, I found a keyed floppy cable and it works just fine now. Thanks

just as a note, i believe the floppy bus (what the hell is it actually called?) can be sensitive to both the direction of the cable (the twist should be closer to the drive) in addition to the fact that you need pin 1 on the cable going to pin 1 on the drive and on the mobo.

[Jason425]

^^^ is kind of what I said... but in more detail...

[Uranium-235]

yeah, I just never ran into this problem in my years of of working on PC's, ever

[Jason425]

floppy's are cool like that..