Floppy Disk sounds

The floppy drive seek BIOS option sets whether your PC will attempt to detect the
floppy (a:) drive during boot up. Whether it finds one or not, once Windows has
loaded it becomes irrelevant, as control of hardware devices including drives are
handed over from the BIOS to the operating system.

Disabling the ?floppy drive seek? option in the ?advanced BIOS features? section of the
BIOS can save you a few seconds on boot up, and since the setting has no actual
effect, you can safely disable it.

If so then the floppy cable is connected wrong.
Have a look at your floppy drive.
The twisted part of the cable connects to the floppy drive, if you look closely you will see either a white or red line on one side, this line side goes (looking from the back of the drive) to the left, the other end of the cable connects to the motherboard. There is an option in the bios for "floppy seek", mark this as "disable.

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.

If you're like me, the last time I used my floppy drive was almost two years ago. With the low cost of USB memory sticks and such, do you really need a floppy drive?
Make an XP boot CD or USB boot stick and can the old floppy.

Other than that.... TrueBlue's advice is dead on.

BTW, I just picked up a Kingston 4GB USB stick for under $10 US (delivered) from Buy.com. Anyone want some old slightly used floppy discs? :-)

And after it tests it the System does what is called a POST Power On Self Test.

After the System posts and you boot into XP it will again look at the floppy as it opens XP this is perfectly normal and is the way that the system works.

If the light is on all the time or you are getting a POST Error things are different then but with what you asked this is the way that things are supposed to work.

If you have a problem post back with the symptoms and any error messages that you are getting.

Col

Many BIOS menus allow one to sort the boot device order:

Floppy drive
CD drive
Hard drive

I would suggest resorting as follows:

CD drive
Hard drive
Floppy drive

With this scheme, you can boot from a CD (such as the installation CD) before the BIOS checks the hard drive. When no CD is found, the BIOS checks the hard drive and boots from that. Your floppy drive will simply be ignored.

Rick/Portland, OR