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Bad Floppy Drive

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6 replies

by arichart

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Trying to re-build a (gateway) computer and have everything in place. When I boot up I get a bad floppy error. I have tried "flipping" the direction of the cable. On one side, the little green access light on the floppy drive is on constantly. On the other, it scans for a disk, but will not recognize that I have a WIN98 Startup disk in the drive (says that there is an I/O error). I have also tried different floppy drives (older and brand new) as well as taking the bios battery out and starting again. Help!!!???

6 replies

by curacao_dejavu

Hi,

Did you look in the bios at what the settings are for the floppy drive, 360/720,1.22,1.44 MB.
Also try a different datacable.
You can also boot from the cd, if the pc supports it, or copy the i386 folder and boot to dos and start the setup from there.

Leopold

by sgt_shultz

sounds like you have tried all the right stuff. maybe you have a bad floppy io port on the motherboard...make sure you have looked at all this before concluding it's bad...(and as you have figured out, the green light on constantly is your giveaway that the cable is backwards)
1) floppy drive shows up at boot screen, shows up in BIOS as 1.4MB drive
2)if you are trying to boot from a win98 startup floppy, make sure the BIOS boot settings have the floppy device as the first boot device, or if it is listed after the cdrom drive, make sure there is no cd in the drive...
2) floppy drive shows up in Windows 98 Device Manager. with no yellow bangs or red x's. with the properties looking the same as in a system with a working floppy drive...
3) you've tried a floppy drive and cable and Win98 startup disk from a machine in which they work...

by arichart

Bad Floppy. I had just used that startup the day before, but it was the problem. Thanks!

by arichart

I forgot to mention that either way, the computer will not boot to DOS. It goes to a blinking underscore in the top left corner of the screen after noting that there was a floppy error.

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