I finished building a new system this past weekend and the boot process doesn't complete. The only components I re-used from my old system were the floppy drive, the modem, and the CD-ROM. The boot goes fine recognizing my new hard drive (primary master) and old CD-ROM (secondary master). It then gives me "floppy drive(s) error (40)". I press F1 to continue and it then tries to boot from the CD, which no matter what CD I put in the tray I get an error message that the CD is not a boot disk. This is where the process stalls and I can go no furthur.

My suspicion is that the floppy drive has failed. I should mention that right from the time I turn the system on, the activity light on the floppy drive comes on and stays on. All the cables are fastened correctly and the BIOS recognizes the correct floppy type. If I go in to the BIOS and disable the "recognize floppy type" (40 or 80 track) the boot process skips the floppy altogether and I get the CD-ROM error message. Am I doing something wrong or do I need a new floppy drive or what?

Any help would be appreciated.

First, check that you haven't inverted the IDE cable for the floppy. This is probably why the led is staying on. Also check to see if you haven't missed the connector by one pin. Should also check the IDE cable for the cd rom. Pin one (usually) goes closest to the drive's power connector.


Ron



[This message has been edited by Hardtek1976 (edited 12-13-2000).]

Ooops, should have also asked what kind of cd's are you using. Win98 and Win Me are bootable, games and data cd's are not. Win95 unknown, maybe someone else can answer that. Also, how is your boot sequence set up in the bios.


Ron

I have made sure that the floppy cable is correct both on the floppy drive and on the motherboard. Same thing with the CD-ROM. I have tried the CD-ROM both as a primary slave and as a secondary master with its own ribbon cable. (It is an older Creative Labs 24x CD-ROM if this helps.) The CDs I tried have been Win95 and Win Me disks. Same result each time. I tried turning my old system on and got all kinds of hard drive failures, but the floppy drive worked. So now I think I lost my hard drive too. Do you think a static discharge could kill everything in my old computer (FD,CD,HD)as I think this is what happened to my hard drive, because I can't even complete a rescue operation where before I opened the case everything was working fine.

BIOS sequence is set to HDD-0, Floppy, CD-ROM. I have disabled switch floppy drive.

But, I'm rambling...I just want to get my system up and running and then I'll worry about the hard drive. Thanks.

Ron is correct about why your floppy drive light stays on all the time. Pin 1 is usually near the power connector of the drive. The floppy drive cable has red markings on it which indicates wire 1 to be connected to pin 1. Find marking on the motherboard for pin 1 also.
Windows 95 is not bootable from CD-Rom.
Booting from a CD is neat but not worth the headache if it's not working. I suggest creating a startup disk from Windows 98 and boot with CD-ROM support. I'd rather you install Windows 98 vs. Windows 95 if that option is available to you!

Thanks for the info. That's what I thought when I tried to reverse the floppy cable, but it won't seem to go in that way.(??) The middle part of the cable has a raised edge that seems to correspond to an opening in the drive. The same is true for the other end of the cable on the mobo side. The floppy connector on the mobo (an EPoX EP-8KTA2) has a small arrow on it and that is the end I am plugging the pin1 side of the cable to. I made sure that the connector is not off a pin also but will verify.

If the cable is keyed then it should be impossible to install it the wrong way. The next step would be to replace the cable. If that doesn't work then perhaps the floppy drive has gone bad. Can you put the floppy drive back into the old system and verify its functionality that way?
If it does work in the old system, then fish around in the bios from some settings. (Although I don't think there is anything in there that would make it act like that.)

A friend of mine had exactly the same problem. He found that one of the pins on his floppy drive had bent inwards. Before being aware of this the ribbon cable appeared to fit with no problem. It was not until he delved deeper with a mini maglite that he found tne problem.

Can you also confirm the type of BIOS software and motherboard?

Well, that's exactly what I did last night, and lo and behold: my floppy drive is keyed at both the top and the bottom. I was finally able to flip the cable over and now the hard drive works fine! Thanks for all the help. Hopefully I won't have too many other problems!