Oh no. Floppy disk(40) error.

God, this is embarrasing. Everyone should know this but I seem to have completely forgotten how to fix it.
So, I wanted to switch to a new harddrive. Now when booting, I get the message 'Floppy disk(s) fail (40)'. Fair enough. I tried to fix it with all the usual ways: power off, disconnect power cable, plug in floppy drives power+IDE cables, power back on and boot. No dice. Tried to connect the data cable this way and that with no results. The LED stays on, so it's getting power and all the other drives are working fine, so it's not about powercable being wrong way. Datacable sits firmly both on the drive and on the mobo- I can't possibly push it tighter on either one. In BIOS it says correctly that the drive is for 1.44 MB floppy and I also disabled the floppy drive from booting. It must be the datacable but nothing seems to work. Eh? So, what am I forgetting? What's the right procedure now? This is getting ugly, since my modems' drivers are on a floppy (only thing I really need the damn drive for) so I simply must get it to work.
Yelp! No, I mean Help!

In your BIOS, go to "Advanced BIOS Features" --> "Boot Up Floppy Seek".
Make sure that this is set to "Disabled".

Here's a little trick to remembering how the floppy drive lettering works on the data cable.

A: drive is connected AFTER the twist in the data cable, and B: drive is connected BEFORE the twist in the data cable

The reason the floppy drive LED stays on is because the cable is on backwards, usually on the drive side of things. Another thing to look at is that some drive models have pin 1 located next to the power connector and some do not!!!

Thanks for the compliment APK

As for the original poster, please follow APK's advice here, this happens to me on occasion because I'm not paying attention

Thanks guys for your help but, unfortunately, still no luck. What I've done so far is this:
- detached A-drives cables, booted and set BIOS to Floppy:none and not booting with it(obiously) Boot order was set to hard drive as first and D-drive as second, third none. saved and went to Windows and the shut the box.
-attached A-drive cables, booted and in BIOS set floppy to correct 1.33/3.5, stll non-booting option for it. saved, got the error message but went to Windows anyway and closed it.
- switched the data cable around, booted and got the error message again. installed the drives from Windows again,closed it and rebooted. stll the same.closed the Windows again.
-switched the cable around once more,booted and set A-drive to boot as third in order but still get the message.
I'm out of ideas. Does anything above strike as obvious mistake to you? The A-drive is brand new, so it can't be that it's simply broken. All I can think of is that the data cable is busted or I actually managed to switch between A- and C-drive cables. The A-drive cable sort of stands alone on the mobo, whereas the one for the C-dive in next to RAM-memory bank, right? Also, As far as I remember, the red ribbon on data cable goes to pin#1 and that usually is closes to the drive motor, in the middle. It's odd that even if the ribbon is 'on the side' of the drive, nothing happens. There's probably just some small detail I've forgotten that causes the hick-up. But which one

Well actually you can't rule out the *new* floppy drive as being bad, I've built many machines with new floppy drives that have been bad from the factory

However, you may also be having an issue with the onboard FDC. When you disable it of course the issue goes away but enable the FDC once again and the problem comes back. SO let's assume the floppy drive is good but if the FDC is bad then this problem will still occur.

The only way to check this out is to connect this *new* floppy drive to another machine and see if it functions or replace your current motherboard with another one and see if the onboard FDC is at fault. Sorry this is not an easy thing to troubleshoot but I'm giving you info from a system builder and of course the company I work for has lot's of stock to test things out with

Bloody success!!! Thanks guys, especially jmmijo Actually, your advice to try the drive on another machine gave the solution- it wasn't the drive but the cable. I took it with me to my mates and sure enough, the drive worked fine with his cable but not with mine. It must've been damaged at some point when tinkering inside doing this or that. Just went and bought a new cable and everything is fine now.Sweet
8)
Heh, funny thing happened when we were testing the drive. Just in case, I brought the modem driver floppy with me (for which I needed the floppy drive) to see if we could turn it into bootable CD. After many hairraising attempts, when the drivers tried to install themselves into my mates box, we managed to burn the CD. Only after that, an idea occured to us:'You know, there's this new thing called internet. Maybe we could've tried from there'. First hit in the Google took us to the manufacturer's page lol. Live and learn, people
Cheers and thx, guys.
[Edited by Tom-boy on 2004-12-28 12:43:04]