DOSdm wrote on Yesterday, 18:14:

I recently had a lot of trouble with my floppy drive on my 486, only to discover that the cable was indeed flipped somehow even though I don't remember doing that. While I can now use the floppy drive, it only works in Win95. I was able to view the contents of a bootdisk I made, but when I tried running the installer on my TIE Fighter floppy it seems to get stuck reading the drive forever. It will not work at all in DOS, doesn't even light up until I am in Windows and access a file on the disk. These floppy disks also worked fine before.

I called the guy that set it up and sold it to me and he suggested cleaning the floppy drive heads, but I was wondering what you all think.

1. What was it doing pre cable flip? Light on all the time?
2. Is the drive configured in BIOS?
3. Does it seek on a cold POST?
4. If you try to switch to the floppy in DOS what is the exact message?

1. It worked fine. I believe I may have knocked the cable loose when I was inside and plugged it in without thinking about its orientation, but it worked completely fine before that.
2. Yes BIOS is configured for a 1.44Mb, 3.5 in drive.
3. No, it does not seek at all during cold boot.
4. "Not ready reading drive A. Abort, retry, fail?"

DOSdm wrote on Today, 03:06:

1. It worked fine. I believe I may have knocked the cable loose when I was inside and plugged it in without thinking about its o […]
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1. It worked fine. I believe I may have knocked the cable loose when I was inside and plugged it in without thinking about its orientation, but it worked completely fine before that.
2. Yes BIOS is configured for a 1.44Mb, 3.5 in drive.
3. No, it does not seek at all during cold boot.
4. "Not ready reading drive A. Abort, retry, fail?"

That message means DOS has A registered as a valid driver letter. So that's good. Is the drive light on all the time right now?

No, after I realized the cable was flipped I made sure I aligned the pins correctly and the light doesn't stay on anymore. But the light also doesn't flicker when I boot like it's supposed to. If I put a floppy disk in the light turns on and stays solid, but only in Windows. In DOS it doesn't do anything at all.

No, after I realized the cable was flipped I made sure I aligned the pins correctly and the light doesn't stay on anymore. But the light also doesn't flicker when I boot like it's supposed to. If I put a floppy disk in the light turns on and stays solid, but only in Windows. In DOS it doesn't do anything at all.

Windows accesses the diskette drive via its own 32 bit drivers. DOS leans far more into how the BIOS is configured. Are you sure it's configured as 1.44MB 3.5" and not 1.2MB or something like that? You can force this setting by adding this line in config.sys:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\DRIVER.SYS /D:0 /F:7

Another thing worth trying: you've been playing around with CD-ROM drivers for DOS. Some of those can result in conflicts with the diskette drive. Try booting in Safe mode command prompt only and see if diskette drive works now without a loaded CD ROM drive.