Major floppy problems... new mobo and cpu

[boxergirl]

Ok.. here's the deal..

We bought a Celeron 333 MHz, a PC Wave M726 MB w/BXCEL Chipset, 32 Mb 100 MHz SDRam Dimm 8 n.s.

Built two of these tonight (with hard drives and cd roms.. etc) but CANNOT get the floppy drive to work. Made sure it was installed in the bios, made sure it was the first to boot... etc. Have tried flipping the cables.. made sure all was working... once we finally did get it to boot, started loading DOS and about 18% completed, it suddenly said it could not read from drive A:

This is happening on BOTH boards. We've checked everything. Jumpers, you name it... any ideas?? Tech support where we bought them is closed until mid-day tomorrow.

We are at a total loss.

Anyone with ANY ideas, please email me!! I can email back and let you know if I've tried what you suggest..

Ready to pull my hair out!! THANX

[jokostel]

sounds like a bad floppy drive.......

[Bleeding Edge]

Yeah. It does.

Is there one available that's working now you can use to double check.

[MR COMPUTER]

Try a different floppy disk?

[Junior]

Set the bios to seek the floppy so that you will know right away if the floppy is working or not. Make sure that floppy drive swap is disabled in the bios also. You could also double check to make sure the floppy drive setting in the bios is set to 1.44 mb floppy. Try swapping the cable. I have seen some floopy cables that are bad. Also try using a floppy that you know that works.

[Junior]

Oh forgot to mention, double check to make sure that the cable end with a twist in the cable is going in to the floppy not the board. Have seen a few people make this mistake. Also red side of cable goes to pin 1. Pin 1 on the floppy is typically close to the power cable.

[boxergirl]

Ok.. Have tried two diff floppy drives. Same result.

I've flipped the cables. And yes, the twist is going to the floppy.

The bios is set to seek the floppy first. We even unplugged the hard drives.

It tries to check it... sometimes. We've even put in the DOS or Win startup diskette.. most of the time it fails to find the floppy, but when it does, it says it's a non system disk. (we even got this error about the hard drive once or twice) Which I know to be untrue since I used them the night before (and many many times before) on a different computer.

It is set to 1.44 floppy.

And the pin 1 is in pin 1. We've flipped, flopped and twisted in every direction trying to fix ths. Tried other cables..

The odd thing is that it happens on BOTH boards.

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

[Bleeding Edge]

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

[MudMan]

boxergirl,

When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable must be right. It sounds like both MBs are defective.
Can you beg/borrow another MB(another brand perhaps) and test the rest of your setup?
My $0.02.

[boxergirl]

Thanks for all the input. Never could get it to read off of the drives. They boot, but say there's no boot record. Tried every bootable diskette possible, tried 3 different drives, 3 different cables.. checked the bios.. etc. No luck..

The boards are going back.

Thanks again. This is a great forum with great folks!!