Why does floppy not work and green light stays on?

Question

My name is ludger jean-charles, and recently i was saving a file on a floppr disk, and as I finished and I pushed the eject bottom on my tower the disk would not come out, the metal part that covered the disk somehow prevented the disk from coming out.

So I turned off my computer removed all the plugs and opened up the tower I removed the floppy drive and managed to dislodge the disk without taking the floppy drive apart or damaging any wires, I put everything in it's right place and closed the tower and pluged everything in, turned on the computer and tested the floppy to see it it worked, at first it was slow to detect the dick but it did. But than after that it couldn't detect any disk if I put one in.

The green light is on but there is no disk in there, when I put a disk in it dosen't make that saound that it usualy makes when I go to start and run to open a file on the floppy, insted I get a message like 3 min later saying there is nothin in the drive.. What should I do, I tryed to go to systems and removing the floppy drive and restarting so it could detect the drive but still I end up in the same position. I need some help.

thank you

Answer

This question was answered on February 7, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Hello and thank you for your question.

From what you have described it sounds like the ribbon cable could be reversed or possibly not seated completely in the slot.

If the ribbon cable is reversed it will cause the light to stay on and the drive to malfunction. I suspect this might be the problem since you had to remove the drive to dislodge the disk. The cable will have a Blue or Red stripe, this is Pin 1 and when plugged in this stripe should be closest to the power plug on the drive. On the Motherboard there should be a small #1 by one end of the adapter slot, again stipe ,Pin 1 to #1. Also it's very common for the adapter slots and plugins to be keyed with a notch or a groove. If thats the case they will only plug in one way. If after doing these steps and the floppy still does not work then I would think that the Floppy drive itself is damaged and in need of replacement.

Hope I have been of some help.

Author

Posted by Lanny of Chandler-Gilbert Community College on February 7, 2001