The floppy drive hasn't worked on our old P4 computer for some time. Having gotten a new computer going, we found through testing that the actual drive in the old computer didn't work, nor did another scavanged one we had previously tried in the old computer. So we found one that did work in the new computer, put it in the old computer, and it didn't work there with either of the cables we tried. OK, maybe the IDE floppy interface on the old motherboard has gone bad? I guess we can live with that.

To confirm that, we put the working floppy drive back into the new computer. Hmm, its not working there. Maybe it got damaged in the old computer?

So hooked up the previously working floppy drive in the new computer, which never got moved out of it, with its normal cable, being very careful to hook it up the same way as it was before. Now its not working, giving the same error as the one above;

A:\ is not accessible. No ID address mark was found on the floppy disk.

Could the old computer have done something to a floppy drive that caused it to then damage the interface with the drive on the new one? It seems hard to believe, but I don't know enough about it to be sure.


(Moderator edit: moved post to more appropriate forum. jgweed)

Check your BIOS. It's possible that the reference to your A:\ drive has been disabled.

FWIW - I finally gave up on floppy support in XP. None of my system have them now. But I do have a USB floppy drive that works whenever I need one.

Thanks for moving it Moderator, I didn't spot the hardware forum.

Got the one in the new computer going again; the cable needed to be reversed between the two floppy drives, which I didn't expect. Thats good, because the new one needs RAID drivers loaded from the floppy when you are installing. Would a USB floppy drive work for that? We had trouble getting it to recognize the CD drive when trying to use the Maxtor hard drive software.

Their is still a mystery on the old computer; I tried the floppy drive that used to work but got put in the old computer, and it doesn't work any more. Thats three floppies that seem to not be working after getting put in there. . .

Is it possible that there is a motherboard fault on the old P4 computer that could kill floppy drives when you hook them up?