Floppy troubles

[Armadel]

My Pc has lost its awareness of my 3.5 floppy drive.

Thinking that the drive was defective, I replaced it.
It is still not seen.

So, my next idea is to get a new floppy cable and see if that works.
If there is no joy, I assume that the mobo has a problem.
Is there anything I can do about a mobo problem ?

Additionally, the reason I use a floppy is to create an ERD.
Emergency Recovery Disk for Win2000.

Is this not necessary, and if so, what would be your recommendations for an alternative ?

As always, I really appreciate the help.

Armadel.

[M_Six]

Go into Device Manager and uninstall the floppy drive and floppy drive controller. Then reboot and let Windows "find" them as new hardware. It'll reinstall the drivers and they should work ok after that.

[mar122999]

Try that and if it doesn't work, check BIOS to see if you have the floppy drive added.

[OuTpaTienT]

Does your bios see the floppy? Is it enabled in the bios?

btw, I pulled the floppy drive out of my machine about 8 months ago, and haven't missed it at all.

[Armadel]

I enabled the floppy in the BIOS, but Win2000 still doesn't detect it .

So now I am stumped as to what to try.

[mar122999]

You can go back into BIOS and select "Restore factory defaults" or "Restore optimized defaults". After doing this, check to make sure that your floppy drive is still enabled (or selected as 1.44" floppy drive). After you verify that it is ready to go, MAKE SURE THAT YOU EXIT SAVING CHANGES.

[Bovon]

You enabled the floppy in your BIOS?... was it disabled when you first looked?.. which floppy did you enable, A: drive? or B: drive.

When you are booting, do you see the LED on the floppy drive flash on and back off? Does the LED stay on?

Are you positive you have the ribbon cable turned correctly?..it will only work one way.

Most floppy drives have to have a small power adapter to connect the drive to a molex power connector...if your LED is not coming on at all...check to see if that adapter to the molex connector is in good shape.

[Epidemic]

Viagra!!!

[Siliconjunkie]

I would say ditch the floppy. With USB pen drives and CD-RWs they are dinosaurs.

[Armadel]

I went into bios, restored failsafe defaults, and the floopy shows up as, 1.44 MB, 3.5 IN, or somesuch.

I swapped the molex to another connection, and reseated the data cable. As I saw it, there is only 1 way it will fit, because of the notch thingie.

Rebooted, and I swear that I heard that grinding noise a floppy makes when it is accessed, buttttttttttttt.
No floppy light comes on, and when I look in explorer, no A: drive is there.
Additionally, I went to a DOS prompt and tried:
A:

Got this message:
The system cannot find the drive specified.

I also tried it by putting a bootable floppy in, but it made no difference.

More headaches, and thanks for all the help.

Silicon, is there a way to make an ERD for use by a USB pen drive or CD ?