Oops,

floppy 3.5"drive NOT working after numerous drives installed was the intended title.

Does the floppy drive attempt to read the disk? Or does it give you the insert disk message with no activity from the floppy drive at all?

It gives the message to insert disk so no activity.

Its leaving me scratching my head having me thinking either the 34 pin cable i ordered from Amazon is bad or the floppy port on the mobo is bad, who knows? I will try to find a new cable from somewhere maybe ebay or try to find a retro computer swap meet if they are even a thi ng. The search continues.

Can you post pics of the cable?

Are you sure the cable is plugged in correctly on the motherboard and on the floppy? Pin 1 on the cable goes to pin 1 on the motherboard and on the floppy drive?

What is the BIOS setting for the floppy drive?

RetroGear1 wrote on 2026-03-17, 01:26:

It gives the message to insert disk so no activity.

The message doesn't mean "no activity" - it means it couldn't read from the disk.

Does the drive LED come on when you try to access it? Does it spin.

Is it enabled in BIOS and set to the right drive type?
There are two distinctly different 3,5: drive types which look the same, but operate at different data rates and won't work if not set to the right type.
(Since you tried a bunch of drives, I'm guessing that at least one was a 1.44M HD)

When you restart, does the drive LED come on and does it perform a seek as BIOS tests it?

If you configure your BIOS to boot from A: before C: does it activate A: then switch to C: after trying for a bit, or does it
boot C: right away. The thing we are trying to figure out is if the system is actually accessing the drive or not.

If really "no activity":

Is the drive jumpered as 2 (second position)?
Are you attaching it at the end of the cable (with the twists inline)?

Do you have any other working floppy drives in the system, or can it boot from USB?
What I'd like to do is boot DOS with ImageDisk on it - ImageDisk will access the drive directly (not through OS or BIOS) and will let us try things like seeking/reading/writing even if it doesn't see the media, so you can do a lot more diagnistics.

RetroGear1 wrote on 2026-03-17, 01:45:

Its leaving me scratching my head having me thinking either the 34 pin cable i ordered from Amazon is bad or the floppy port on the mobo is bad, who knows? I will try to find a new cable from somewhere maybe ebay or try to find a retro computer swap meet if they are even a thi ng. The search continues.

If you have another PC with floppy, or know someone who does, it's dead easy to try that known working drive and cable, which would at least tell you the mainboard works and the BIOS is configured correctly.
(you might not even have to take the drive out - if you can sit the systems close beside each other backward, you could run the floppy cable and power to the other system)

RetroGear1 wrote on 2026-03-17, 00:48:

...I have installed Windows xp service pack 1 so I assumed that I don't require any drivers. ...

WinXP shouldn't need drivers for the floppy, and you al least should be able to see if BIOS tries to boot even if no OS support.

You installed XP from CD/DVD? I do have diagnostic CDs made up to boot DOS/ImageDisk to debug when floppies don't work at all...
If your optical drive happens to be a writer I could give you an ISO to be able to do these basic tests.

Thanks Dave DDS, Cyclone 3d and NeoG for helping out.
I made sure that pin 1 was in the right orientation with the cable on the side where cable has a color line. The floppy cable has a notch that lines up with the mobo as well where the mobo connection is made.
I tired re-inserting the floppy cable back into the floppy drive and now I am getting a solid Led light that is lit but nothing else. So now I am finally getting power to the floppy drive but it does not recognize or see it at all in the OS.

I went back into bios and
Led light from 1.44 floppy drive does not come on. windows xp sp1 was installed from cd.
I will try your suggestions and check the bios settings.

In bios settings under "Standard CMOS Features" under drive A it is set to 1.44M, 3.5" in the menu level that "No floppy drive installed"

The boot up screen just before it goes into windows xp shows up as follows:
Diskette Drive A : 1.44M, 3.5"
Pri. Master Disk : LBA, SATA, 159GB
Pri. Slave Disk : DVD-RW, SATA
Sec. Master Disk : DVD-R, SATA
Sec. Slave Disk : None
Then when I go into bios setup mode it shows under CMOS utility setup "PATA IDE set to Auto"

As for pics I am unable to post due to newbie status.

The XP sp1 was installed from cd.

I tried to configure BIOS to boot from A: before C: to try to activate A: then switch to C:
still no luck.

I will try to find another floppy cable to see if it will finally work.

Solid red light means a few things.

First, it's red. That's very unusual for 1.44mb drives. Are you SURE this is not a 720k drive?
Second, "Drive light stays on" is indicative of cable on upside down. Are you SURE, absolutely SURE, it is on rightside up?

DERP, it helps if you put your glasses on, old man.

If you have a phone, use its camera to take pictures inside the drive's diskette flap, on both the right and left sides of the flap, then upload them to postimages.org (this will let you get around the newbie 'no uploads' restriction).

Just put the links to the images in your posts instead as inline images.

I'd still like to see the inside of the diskdrive flap, both left and right sides of the slot.
I also want to see this cable job.

No a great day so far, 🤣, just lost my hard drive boot as the Bios no longer sees it after reverting back to boot sequence from hard drive. I did try to change setting in bios to boot from there but it is no longer listed in the bios and shows up as "DISK BOOT FAILURE"

Looks like I ll have to tackle this one first before getting back to the original issue with the floppy.

Perhaps you "lost" the configuration for you HD?

What does BIOS say your HD is configured as, and does that match the actual drive type. If it a very common/older drive, it may be listed as an option in BIOS to pick the drive, but often you have to set a "User" type wher you have to specify the cylinders, sectors/track and sides... you would have to lookup the drive model to find the right settings.

If you are luck, there may be an "Auto" setting, or a "Detect drives" option which will figure out the right values.

--

Odd that the drive LED doesn't even come on - usually at boot BIOS in testing for drives will briefly light the LED. Unless your mainboard floppy controller is defective, this would mean -Drive jumpered incorrectly, -Bad drive or -Bad cable - do you have access to another PC you can try the cable & drives in?

Where the 160GB velociraptor used to show up in IDE channel 0 Master and previously worked well, now it does not show up at all in the bios showing O capacity, O for cylinder/head and I did try auto setting. The hdd has disappeared even though it is fully cable to mobo and psu.

I am starting to wonder if my mobo is the issue after all and might be failing.

While messing with the floppy, did you move or changre ANY other connections/jumpers/settings (even if you're sure you changed then back)?

Yes, things can and do ramdomly fail, but when it happens just after you've been in the system "messing around" it's more often than not more than a coincidence.

Is your CD also IDE - does it still show up in BIOS? - Can you still boot from it (you can boot the XP install CD without going through installation) - it would probably fail as there's no hard drive .... but you should be able to tell if it boooted!

Found the problem with the hdd,

In the process of trying to get the bios to see the floppy drive I incorrectly set the On-chip sata mode to "combined" hoping it would help in seeing the floppy drive. Silly me. Xp Hdd is now working, so back to floppy issue.

https://postimg.cc/gallery/3yDYHtd

Dose your cable have a twist in it? If not you will likely need one that dose. On a standard PC, any drive plugged in before the twist in the cable will be assigned to drive B.

You have a socket LGA755 motherboard. Most motherboards this new only support a single drive. Any drive installed as drive B will not be recognized by the motherboard.

Is the red stripe of the floppy cable next to the power connector, if not you may have an early drive that has the floppy connector installed incorrectly.

Many people just trimmed the index tab off of the cable to make it fit correctly.