Floppy drive, move = kill?

[kchen]

I built my new system last night using mostly new parts but I moved my floppy from my old system to the new one. Not 5 minutes earlier I used the drive in my old system to create an emergency boot disk. Everything was fine.

But now it's in the new machine, and whenever I insert a disk it starts trying to read it and makes a grinding noise for a few seconds. Then it eats the disk. It de-formats it and in some cases even caused some "address marks" to disappear, making the disk un-formattable. I've tried switching cables and that doesn't help.

Does anyone have an inkling as to what happened there? Replacing the drive, if necessary, isn't a big deal but I just want to understand why it was working 5 minutes earlier and then decided to start doing that crap.

 

[Mr5oh]

Odds are the drive just picked a wierd time to die. If it is actually physicall damaging the disks, I wouldn't use it anymore.

I still always buy my floppy drives from the local surplus store, for a whopping $5. Normally even brand new ones are only $10-15.

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[kchen]

Well, it seems I have found the culprit. I took the drive out and looked at the connector pins, one of them is missing. Must have fallen out when I unplugged it from my old PC. $800 worth of new computer equipment foiled by a tiny metal pin. Oy.

 

[Crashman]

There's SUPPOSED to be a pin missing, it's the second pin from the left as you face the rear on the bottom row. That's a key pin, for cables that use pin blocking to key the cable so it only goes on one way.

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