I tried to hook up a 5.25" floppy drive to both of my computers, so I can get data off old disks. I tried on both my P200 Win98 machine and my 1.2g Athlon Duron machine. On both machines, I get a floppy drive fail message on bootup if I go into the bios and specify that there's a 5.25" drive on A:. On the Win98 machine, if I put the 5.25" under B: it boots up without failure, but the drive shows up as A: in Explorer and can't be accessed. On the Win2k machine, if I put the 5.25" under B: it also boots up without failure, but no floppy drives show up in Explorer at all. Is there some way to get either comp to recognize the drive as A:? I'm just hooking up the drive by itself, with no other floppies on it. Or, is there some way to make the floppy drive show up in Win2k?

Which connector on the floppy cable are you using. If using the one on the end you must set as A: 5.25/1.2MB. There is a split in the cable near the end and anything past that split has to be A:. Conversely, if using the MIDDLE connector the settings must be for B:1.2MB. BIOS must support that drive size and capacity.

sounds like a bad floppy drive