Floppy drive not working

Open the case and check and make sure all connectins are firmly set. Worse comes to worse I think a new floppy be drive can be bought for around 10-15 bucks now-a-days.

Hi,

If for some reason you have had it disconnected recently, then flip the ribbon cable over. That is an easy mistake to make when one works in the computer case.

The ribbon cable normally goes on with the red wire toward sthe inside of the drive unlike HDD's which are pointing towards the open side & power plug. Usually though if the cable is wrong way round the LED (or little light) on the front panel is permanently ON. Also there is no response from trying to access the drive.
IMHO you have a faulty drive and the PC cannot tell that a disk has been put in. Here in Greece ( and probably throughout Europe) a new floppy drive is about 5 Euro. Borrow a drive to make sure that it's not a motherboard problem (that is also possible) and also check out your floppy on another system. As said earlier make sure that your cables (especially on the mobo) are pushed home, also double check that the drive has been enabled and is set to 1.44MB in BIOS.

I don't ever recall detaching the ribbon cable from the floppy drive or the motherboard,I've unplugged the power connector once or twice but that's it.What's the best way to find out if it is enabled in the BIOS as I'm scared I might change something by accident.Do I go to Advanced BIOS Features and see it listed there?

Normally the floppy is mentioned on the first page that opens .. below the HDD's .. well that was the way with AWARD BIOS .. but just remembered that things are changing .. have changed

You've given us no details about your mobo so I can't really answer that question ..
The best thing to do is play safe. DON'T change anything until you can understand what you are doing. When you quit BIOS ... QUIT WITHOUT SAVING CHANGES. you should find a menu with an option or just hit the ESC key until asked if you want to quit without saving chnages.

Give us some info and laos read your motherboard manual which has a section in it about BIOS and what things do ..
ASK us about anything you don't understand.

I should have mentioned,it's an Award BIOS.Well it seems to show up as 1.44mb,3.5" under Drive A in Standard CMOS Features and it's second in Boot order so there's nothing disabled by the looks of it.

I will get hold of another floppy drive for cheap and see if that corrects the problem.

We're here if you need us .. Good Luck

Success! I've replaced the floppy drive with another one and all seems to be working fine now! It reads disks no problem. So it was like I thought, a faulty drive all along! Thanks for all your help, really appreciate it!

Well done .. all it required was the confidance to believe in yourself.