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broken floppy-disk connector

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by jsmart 1 view

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My floppy disk wasn't working and upon troubleshooting it I discovered that three pins in the motherboard floppy-disk connector were broken (missing). Can anyone help me? What does one do when this occurs -replace the entire motherboard?
thank you.

5 replies

by thechas

The pins and or connector can be replaced.

HOWEVER, this requires a TRAINED SOLDER TECHNICIAN with excelent skills, along with specialized tools.

Most motherboards have at least 4 circuit layers, and some have as many as 8.

If a track, or the plated hole that the pin is in are damaged, the motherboard becomes scrap.

It may be cheaper, easier, and SAFER to find a plug in controller card with floppy drive support, or an alternate drive option.

Super Disk (LS-120)
External Parallelport drive
External USB drive

The controller card would be the least expensive, the LS-120 the most elegant.

LS-120 drives connect like a hard drive, or CD drive. They support both floppy disks, and 120 MB super disks.

Chas

by jsmart

great answer - Chas (I'm assuming he is a male) told me exactly what I wanted to know plus beyond that he gave me a few helpful suggestions for solutions that I was not aware of.

by rboggio1

By the way your statement reads, I would assume your floppy was working and then quit? My main thought is when you "discovered" the pins missing did you find the actual pins in the cable connector? If not I would say the pins were not there to beginwith. Not all 34 pins are used to control the floppy drive. Some manufactures of drives and MB's alike do not put all 34 pins in. I would look in the BIOS and make sure there is a ?A? drive setup. If that is correct I would suspect the drive or cable is bad. I would go to the drive first, seldom does they cable just "go" bad. Unless there has been an outside anomaly like a power surge, or the cable fell into the CPU fan. Screwdriver fade or case crunch could affect it also. After checking the BIOS and trying another floppy and cable and failing to have success then it might be time to consider other options as THECHAS has described. One last thought, maybe to simple of a thought but the last connector on the cable after the twist is the connector on the "A" drive correct?

by jsmart

This answer was helpful because it confirmed a few things that I only suspected to be true.

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