Floppy Drive Error

Ok so I recently installed a floppy drive on my desktop computer I had no use for one until now. It's and NEC black one...the standard stuff.

Well I plug it in correctly and the power to it. I booted up my computer and enabled the floppy drive in the BIOS and what not all that normal stuff. Booted into windows...and....there is the A: yipee! I put a disk in annnnddd....no disk inserted? WTF DO YOU MEAN?

I reboot after using the Hardware Manager to make sure it was enabled, and I noticed during the boot screen. For just a few seconds after the memory test I see this error: Secondary IDE channel no 80 conducter cable installed?

Something like that...I might have mixed the 80 up with IDE though. So I googled it...and have yet to come up with an actual solution.

The motherboard is a ASUS A7NX, and I have installed (before the floppy drive) a CDRW , and DVDRW drive along with two hard drives..is there a conflicting issues with how I have those drives installed? Please Help 4chan!

Leaving aside the floppy drive issue for the moment, the "Secondary IDE channel" message has nothing to do with your troubles, and in most cases is not even a problem at all. 80 conductor IDE cables are used on hard disks to allow the faster ATA modes (ATA-66 and higher, IIRC). These types of cables are clearly distinguishable from the old-school 40 wire ribbon cables, since they have visibly more wires, and the plugs are often coloured blue at one end, and black and grey at the other (just a point of note: 80 conductor cables don't have more pins than the 40 wire ones - they just have 40 ground wires interlaced with the data wires to help reduce noise and crosstalk). Anyway, while you do need 80 conductor cables for modern hard disks, you don't really need them for CD/DVD drives, whose transfer rates are much lower than hard drives. Many motherboards/BIOSes flag this as a possible problem because you don't necessarily have to have CD/DVD drives on the secondary channel - they could just as easily be more hard disks. If you connected your hard disks with a 40 conductor cable on the primary IDE channel it would still work, albeit slower, and the POST screen would alert you to having no 80 conductor cable on the primary channel instead. It's for information more than an out-and-out error message. You can ignore it and no harm will occur.

Now, the floppy drive. Your description suggests you've connected up the drive okay (or Windows wouldn't register the drive as existing at all). Have you tried several different disks? 1.44Mb floppy disks are not the most reliable storage medium in the world (understatement), and the quality of some leaves a lot to be desired (last box of 10 I bought had two duff disks straight off the bat). Have you tried formatting any disks? Other than the possibility of a faulty drive, there's not much else I can suggest...

FL..FLOPPY? DRIVE?

WHAT THE HELL

I tried the floppy in another computer and it worked. I also tried some other floppys like you suggested and none of them did...hmm..

well this sucks!

Buy an external USB floppy drive. You can get them for $40 or less nowadays.

>>4
Do you mean the floppy disk that didn't work in your drive worked in another computer? All signs here point to a faulty floppy drive if that's the case.

F-F-F-Floppy disks...... 90% of them fail because they're old (50% of which already failed anytime); out of the remaining 10%, 50% will very soon fail; and for the other half, there's always a faulty floppy drive here and there.

Yeah so looks like a faulty floppy drive...I got it about a week ago now from Newegg OEM, can I just return it?