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Installing 5 1/4" floppy

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Eric422

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Aug 1, 2013
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Location
Alabama
First...sorry for the long post

I am trying to install a 5 1/4" floppy in a P4 windows XP computer. The goal is a temporary set up so I can get data and games off of about 100 floppy disks. The computer has a cd drive and no other floppy drive.

I believe that I have set the bios up correctly. The icon shows up as a 5 1/4 floppy in My Computer. The ribbon cable that I am using has is 4 34 pin female connectors and 2 connectors that will connect to the edge connector of the floppy drive.

Issue 1: the 34 pin connector that connects to the motherboard is slightly different from the motherboard...there is no male bump on the side of the ribbon cable connector. I can plug it into the motherboard 2 ways. Am I using the wrong cable? if not how do I know which way to plug it in.

The drive is a Chinon FR-506. I connected it to the edge connector on the ribbon cable that is the farthest from where it plugs into the motherboard. There is 1-34 pin farther from the motherboard than the edge connector.

I put the disk in...the light comes on and it spins. Windows XP asks me to please insert a disk in drive A. I do not know for sure that the drive works and I do not know if the disks are good...although I tried several disks.

Could anyone give me a step by step procedure to identify my problem. If I am doing something stupid just tell me...my feelings wont get hurt.

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
We need more information, sorry.

1. What is your computer?
2. Does your ribbon cable have a "twist" in it?
3. What do you have the floppy drive select jumpered to?

If the floppy LED comes on and stays on, you probably have the floppy cable reversed. The usual convention (but not universal, due to overseas sloppy labor) is to have the colored conductor (usually a red stripe on the edge of the ribbon cable) on the pin 1/2 side on both the floppy and the motherboard. If (as I hopefully assume), your drive cable has a "twist" near one edge, that should be the side of the cable that's pin 1/2--and the floppy drive select jumper should be set to its second position (that can be either DS2 or DS1, depending on the labeling convention. Some manufacturers labeled the first select DS0, others, DS1).

At any rate, the end of the cable with a twist should be connected to the drive and not the middle connector that's a "flat" connection to the motherboard.

A distant possibility is that you've got a multidrive ST506 cable, but those are pretty uncommon in comparison to the standard floppy cable.
 
1) You need to use a known good disk. Anything short of that is just folly. :)

2) You need to plug the ribbon into the motherboard header so that the edge of the ribbon with the stripe (usually, but not always red) is aligned with pin 1 of the header.

3) There should be a twisted section of the ribbon (7 conductors are twisted) just before the connector you are connecting to the floppy drive. Here you can see the twist as well as the red stripe I mentioned above.

http://www.canadayenterprises.com/Ebay/FloppyDrive/images/Twisted cable.png

Get that sorted out and give it a try.
 
1. Does the connector on the motherboard have a missing pin? That edge should be the bottom edge, so that the red-striped wire on the cable is to the right. Otherwise, try it either way - this shouldn't damage anything, but the usual symptom of having it the wrong way round is that the drive will be constantly spinning - not hard to spot.

As far as the drive side of things, if it's not the last connector on the cable, it's going to be drive B, so if you need it to be drive A you're gonna have to rustle up a header-to-edge-connector adapter. This may be your problem; a lot of more modern BIOSes only recognize drive A, and some of them don't support 5.25" drives at all.
 
Thanks for the fast reply.

The computer is a Dell Dimension 2350

I tried to attach pictures of the cables. I am using the edge connector after the partial twist in the ribbon cable.

at bios:
Drive A [1.2M , 5.25 in.]
Floppy 3 Mode Support [Drive A]
Diskette Write protect [Disabled)

does this help?

DSCN5376.JPGDSCN5377.JPG
 
Note that some later motherboards were designed for use with a non-twisted cable, so if you retrofit a cable with the twist, you have to plug in the drives in the opposite of the normal convention -- instead of the A: drive going after the twist, you put the A: drive before the twist and then the B: drive after the twst.
 
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