Floppy drive isn't working

[TrooperN]

   I got two new pc's and one had a 3.5 inch floppy drive wich i put into my other pc and when I turned it on no lights on the drive came on and the computer did not detect it.    So what should I do or what might the problem be?

[Radium_Angel]

24 minutes ago, TrooperN said:

   I got two new pc's and one had a 3.5 inch floppy drive wich i put into my other pc and when I turned it on no lights on the drive came on and the computer did not detect it.    So what should I do or what might the problem be?

IIRC with floppy drives, nothing happens during post. You need to put a floppy in the drive to see the light turn on.

What OS are you using to see it otherwise?

I assume you hooked it up properly?

[John Ellmaker]

Im more interested in your time travel forward than your issue however, did it work in the original one?

 

Most internal floppy drives have two connectors, one ide style multi pin connector for data and a second much smaller one for power.  I don’t believe a lot of modern power supplies have this power connector and you may need a molex to floppy adapter to power it in that case.

 

Better than both of those would be just buying a usb floppy external drive so you don’t have to mess with that and can use it in either machine imho.

[TrooperN]

27 minutes ago, John Ellmaker said:

Im more interested in your time travel forward than your issue however, did it work in the original one?

 

Most internal floppy drives have two connectors, one ide style multi pin connector for data and a second much smaller one for power.  I don’t believe a lot of modern power supplies have this power connector and you may need a molex to floppy adapter to power it in that case.

 

Better than both of those would be just buying a usb floppy external drive so you don’t have to mess with that and can use it in either machine imho.

Yes it did work in the original pc

[John Ellmaker]

Assuming you have a motherboard that does accept the data connector, check in the bios settings for toggles that enable/disables floppy disk.

 

Look for broken pins on both the floppy drive and the motherboard, test it again in the old system to make sure it still works.  If it does use the cable from the known working environment in the new computer.

 

Beyond that I don’t have much more to offer, I keep a couple of those around because about once a year I’m asked to recover old files that are still amazingly in tact on those, you should be aware it’s likely to get degraded over time so you should move those files to something else if possible.

[TrooperN]

6 minutes ago, John Ellmaker said:

Assuming you have a motherboard that does accept the data connector, check in the bios settings for toggles that enable/disables floppy disk.

 

Look for broken pins on both the floppy drive and the motherboard, test it again in the old system to make sure it still works.  If it does use the cable from the known working environment in the new computer.

 

Beyond that I don’t have much more to offer, I keep a couple of those around because about once a year I’m asked to recover old files that are still amazingly in tact on those, you should be aware it’s likely to get degraded over time so you should move those files to something else if possible.

Ok thank you