I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 460CDT. I found an external floppy disk drive on eBay and it worked for only a brief time. Cleaning the drive made no difference and I wanted to replace it. Here comes me making two mistakes and ending up in the right place. There was a new TEAC Toshiba internal floppy drive listed and I ordered it blind but there was no picture of connector. The original drive was a card edge connector and the replacement was ZIF. Even though there were the same number of pins, connecting the original drive housing wouldn't allow the new drive to work. It would detect the drive but any disk would prompt to be formatted. Jump to a listing for a "new" PA2611U but it came in terrible condition and worked not at all. I pulled the drive and it was ZIF so I put the second drive inside and it works perfectly. Now I have a cobbled together unit with only the drive bezel being darker plastic than the original.

TLDR: Made three separately poor purchases but ended up with the product I needed in the end.

Anyone have a similar experience where they've stubbornly made bad decisions but ended up successful in the end?