Floppy Drive A: Failure

[Richy1985]

Hello all,

I have an old Gateway Socket 5 motherboard that was working fine up until recently, but when I boot up now I receive a 'Floppy Drive A: Failure' message.

I have ruled out:

A bad floppy drive.
Bad floppy ribbon cable.
Incorrect cable connection.
I have installed a FDD controller card and connected the drive to that device but I still get the same problem, I believe the jumpers were set correctly on the FDD card.
I have made sure the Floppy Drive is set to be detected by the BIOS.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!

 

[fixxxer113]

How have you ruled out the bad floppy drive? have you tested it on another PC?

Also, do you have the "Halt On Errors" option in your BIOS? Try disabling that so that the PC doesn't stop booting. Go into windows and see if it works.

 

[faalin]

Go in the bios and tell it to not detect the floppy drive, if you still need one then go buy a 5$ usb external one, and maybe an internal usb add in card for it.

 

[Richy1985]

"How have you ruled out the bad floppy drive? have you tested it on another PC?

Also, do you have the "Halt On Errors" option in your BIOS? Try disabling that so that the PC doesn't stop booting. Go into windows and see if it works."

Yes I tested the drive and cable in another PC and it worked fine. There is no 'Halt On All Errors' in my BIOS. I tried booting from C: first and then told the BIOS not to detect the Floppy A: drive. The boot up sequence will not proceed after the Hard Disk Drive has been detected.

Thanks.

 

[spdragoo]

Then it's definitely something else:
-- potentially corrupted BIOS (although that rarely happens by itself, i.e. usually requires outside intervention like malware or a mistake in BIOS flashing)
-- corrupted Windows installation
-- bad motherboard

If you can, back up or transfer any irreplaceable data from the hard drive, then reinstall Windows on it. If you still get the same problem, especially with a wiped hard drive, then it means the motherboard itself has an issue.

 

[Richy1985]

Hi,

I cannot reinstall Windows 95 because in order to do that I need to boot from a floppy disk. I have put in a different, formatted drive from the same era (an AT compatible drive) and still get the same problem. Any other suggestions? Thanks.

 

[spdragoo]

Does the hard drive boot up in another machine? It's starting to sound like it's the motherboard itself.

 

[Richy1985]

Yes, the hard drive (the unformatted one with Windows 95 installed on it) is successfully detected by the BIOS in another machine, it also successfully boots to Windows. The formatted drive detects successfully in another machine as well.

 

[Richy1985]

My machine is mysteriously working again after I plugged the Floppy cable into the FDD card. I am perplexed. It may be on it's last legs.

 

[ffg7]

or the floppy cable just needed to be reseated but time will tell.