Floppy Drive recognized but not working

[Karnevil9]

I am just finishing up on a Athlon 2500, Soltek SL-75FRN-RL mobo with 1 gig of kingston ram running windows 2000 pro. I bough a Samsung 3.5 Floppy drive from newegg for about $8.00. The floppy drive is recognized on the device manager and in proeprties it says that it has no problems or hardware conflicts, but when I put a disk in the drive and try to upload or download, the "place a disk in the A drive" mesage comes up. I uninstalled it and reinstall it and the drivers with no luck. I checked and double checked the 34 pin connector, Changed the ribbon cable, Changed the power connector and I get the same message. I even changed the floopy drive to one I got out of an old 486 computer, which worked when it was in that computer, and I get the same message. Samsung is not in the windows 2000 pro hardware compatability list, so I went to Samsung to get drivers, but they don't show any for their floppy drives, only their optical devices. Each time with either floppy drive and different Floppies I get the same Place a disk in the A drive message even though there is one there. Any thing else I need to check or do?

[morriswindgate]

The Samsung is defective, the old Floppy is out of date.

[cuffs007]

RMA that sucker back to Newegg pronto!

[Karnevil9]

I had similar thoughts about the old Drive which would then likely mean the new one was bad. I was hoping it was something else so I didn't have to go through the hassle of packing it up and sending it back. Not for $8.00 anyway Now I just have to find the receipt.

[mcmxli]

I too had a similar problem with floppy on a E-machines computer running Windows XP Home edition.. Protective cover on the floppy became dislodged not allowing a diskette to be inserted into drive. Used needle nose pliers and screwdriver to remove protective cover but screwed up drive in the process. Could insert diskette into drive but drive doesn't sense presence of a diskette in the drive. Kept telling me to insert a diskette in drive a. Thinking that the drive was a goner, I removed it and replaced it with a spare drive I had on hand. But guess what? New drive also doesn't sense presence of a diskette in the drive. So I removed this drive and replaced it with another spare drive and again drive did not sense presence of a diskette in the drive. So I removed this drive and replaced it with another spare drive and again drive did not sense presence of a diskette in the drive. All in all, I installed 3 different drives in this machine and none of the drives sensed the presence of a diskette inserted in the drive. So I concluded the problem can't be with the disk drives themselves (four bad? drives in a row! Not likely!)
To my knowledge, the drive cable is connected correctly as the computer recognizes the presence of the drive (and no errors reported in device manager) nor does the drive activity light stay on constantly (a sure sign of an incorrectly connected drive cable.)

Anyone have any ideas as to the cause of this problem and how to correct it?

[Karnevil9]

On my first build I had a similar problem with the floppy drive. In bios the A floppy drive was set for 720 kb floppy diskette, not 1.44 diskette. I am sure that I set it correctly this time, but you may want to check it on yours. I think I will check it again come to think of it. At least make sure I am using a 1.44 floppy. The first one I was using was a pretty old left over.