Floppy drives ?

If it works then it gets put into the keep pile .. if it doesnt but looks repairable then it goes to the repair pile, if its not repairable then it goes to spares or if its a total loss then to ewaste, this really applies to all hardware. 3.5" drives are dime a dozen so mostly they are not even worth keeping to repair unless its a 720k or 2.44mb drive they are both harder to obtain than 1.44mb drives, 5.25" floppy drives are where it gets interesting as they are much harder to obtain these days and in fully working condition are worth quite a bit, especially 360k drives which can be used on a wide range of machines.

As for testing motherboards there really isn't one program to do it all, you pretty much have to test all IO on the board to get a clear picture of how keepable it might be and even then depending on what doesnt work and how rare the board is .. it might be worth keeping even if none of the drive IO works or USB is dead . .both of which can be replaced with PCI cards.

Thanks for your insight. Yes, I've got a lot of 3.5 1.44 drives, and I was looking for a kind-of-reliable way of testing them. Perhaps a system that formats a disk, copies files into it and them back onto the HD and then runs a comparison.

I'm not handy with repairs - if it fails and it's fairly recent (say, a P4 motherboard ), then it goes straight into the e-waste. If it's older, I hand it over to someone who's interested in repairing and keeping it.

The main motive behind creating this thread was to gather opinions on how to test the stuff before deciding what to do with it.

Thanks!

for motherboard testing...
some verified ram, generic vga card, reliable hard drive or SD/CF card adapter.
Then, do a windows install, W95 or W98se. if it installs correctly without errors, Do another new install on the same hardware.

I recently went through about 20 mainboards and only about 5 of them went through the installs without errors

does this imply the mainboard is fully functional ?
No, if it has onboard IO like COM/LPT/2xIDE/PS2 you'll need to test those separately, no software will test those correctly without extra hardware and/or user interaction.