"a: The device is not ready"

I have two system, one with a Square Bios Chip and the other a rectange Bios chip. I don't know how this happened, when I got this both from the same vendor in a week and half difference. The first one I recieved was the square bios chip and installed my old Hard drive with 98se and 2000. My floppy was misbehaving, but it worked because I transfered some files from the old computer. I also updated the bios of that from the factory to "010911" Lan and now a days the floppy does not work. It takes a long time and says that the device is not ready. I tired few different floppy and it all said the same thing. These floppy are an year old or so. On the other machine also, I get the same problem. I have not updated the bios it yet. I run XP on it and when it reads the disk, it says unformatted disk and when I try to format it, it doesn't format. The floppys are not locked either. I even plugged the floppy cable to the floppy other way, but then the light just comes and stay on and does not do a thing. I also enabled the Floppy under Win2k in the Bios for the first machine. Any comments or suggestions to get the floppy working?

[bluetooth]

Did you enable floppy in your BIOS

And/or floppy cable may be bad or not connected correctly on mobo (red stipe to pin 1)

I enabled the floppy in bios. I used the cable that came with the motherboard. Some time it finds the disk and it says that the disk need to be formated. But when I tell try to format, it says that the disk may be damaged or so, but when I tried the same disk on friends computer i work with out a flaw. How do I know that I connected the floppy correctly?

I had the exact same thing happen until I figured out that some of the floppies would give that same "..format.." message and others didnt. The reason was that some of the floppies were older or more abused(sliding metal disk cover harder to move) than other ones. This may reflect on some 1.44 drives having a weaker mechanism to move the cover out of the way..or the floppy drive starting to get a little old....try pulling the cover aside with your fingers and compare..G

[Jimmy]

Ok, I guess I may as well chime in. I'm having the same problem. I'm running WIN98 and have had many problems with floppies since I installed this board. Some have worked, but almost all will not. In fact, I have many that it won't even read, let alone format and/or copy to. This is really getting on my nerves, as I'm trying to set up another system and can't create a boot disk for it. Sounds like this isn't an isolated problem.

[Boyd]

I've had that problem many times... on other boards that is. Solved easily each time, because the floppy cable was not properly aligned to fit the pins on the drive. That is... you may have left 2 pins out on either side when you inserted the cable. Check to see that the cable is properly inserted and the pinout is correct (ie. red part of ribbon cable goes to pin 1 and 2 of the drive and connector on the motherboard). Else, you floppy may be a tad too old.

Hope this helps.

My floppy drives are new. I checked the floppy cables connections and that looks fine. Is there any thing else I should try?

[Boyd]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by vattans:
My floppy drives are new. I checked the floppy cables connections and that looks fine. Is there any thing else I should try?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Swap the floppy cables. There are certain boards sensitive to the type of cable used. I know for a fact FIC boards would not work with cables other than those supplied by themselves.

I have a problem somewhat related to this.
I can't boot from the floppy. It says it can't find boot sector - and when eject it and put it back in, it won't even try to access it again and spits out the same error message again. BTW, the floppy is bootable ;)
Once I get to DOS/Windows, I can read/write to the floppy no problem.
I have seen on the ECS message board one guy saying that this may be related to the fact that I did not format the HD on this board, but, I can't boot from the floppy even when I disable the IDE controllers, so I am doubtful on this.
MC