I decided to follow a basic floppy disk drive troubleshooting procedure I found on the Internet. It stated that the causes for a floppy drive not working may be due to one or more of the following reasons:
1. Bad floppy diskette.
2. Not setup in CMOS.
3. Confliction with other hardware.
4. Not connected properly.
5. Bad drivers.
6. Bad hardware.
One item I later discovered in my writeup was that on application of initial power, the floppy LED did not light up, but the CDROM light did.
Since the floppy drive worked when it was possible to boot the PC up, I knew that the FDD controller and floppy drive were setup properly in the CMOS, and therefore I could eliminate reasons 1-3,5 above. That indicated that I should first check out the connections.
After powering down, and uncabling the chassis, I unbuttoned it, and did not touch the connection on the motherboard - I decided to leave this if disconnecting and reconnecting the cabling on the floppy drive unit itself at the other end of the cable did not work, and if that didn't work to replace the data cable entirely (on a 3rd try) since I did not replace it when I installed a replacement floppy drive last year before my two disks were ghosted as replacements, and I have a spare new one.
After blowing out the dust from inside the cabinet and reseating the connections to the floppy drive itself, the system came up on the very first bootup (HoHah!) without the annoying looping problem.
The procedure for (Not connectd properly) was as follows:
1) Open computer being aware of ESD and its potential dangers - I have an anti-static mat with a wrist anti-static grounding strap.
2) Verify that the floppy connection is connected to the motherboard FDD connector. If it appears to be connected, disconnect and reconnect the cable to verify the cable is seated properly.
3) Verify that the floppy cable coming from the motherboard is connected to the back of the floppy drive - this is what I disconnected/reconnected
4) Verify that a power connection is also connected to the back of the floppy drive - I reseated this also.
5) If the floppy cable has more than one connection verify that you are connecting the floppy to the appropriate connection.
Given that following the above procedure does not work, there may be bad hardware for which the procedure is:
For Bad Hardware:
If you continue to experience issues after following the above steps, it is likely that hardware within the computer is bad. Attempt to replace the following hardware in the computer in the order below:
1) Replace the floppy data cable which connects the computer floppy drive to the motherboard\I/O board - this is what I would have attempted on my 3rd try mentioned above.
2) Replace the floppy if the floppy data cable did not resolve the problem.
3) Replace or requet that the motherboard\I/O board be replaced.
-- Tom
