[ale] floppy problem

[Jim Lynch]

I'm at wit's end.  It all started when I replaced my wife's old pentium
(AT) system with a new 1 ghz ATX system.  She thought I was being nice,
but actually I was just acquiring a Linux server system, or so I
thought.  I had noticed recently that the floppy drive had quit working
so when I swapped systems and loaded Linux on her old one, I looked
around and couldn't see anything wrong, like a loose wire or???.  So I
went out and picked up a new floppy and put it in.  Yes, I put it in
right, the ribbon cable is keyed so I wont' go in backwards.  No soap. 
Nada.  Put a boot disk in and it skips right over booting from A even
though I set it as the first boot device in the CMOS.  OK, must have a
bad controller on board.  No prob.  I've got a spare MB that I use to
have at the office.  I'm sure by now you know that didn't work either,
so, what's next?  Ah, a new ribbon cable.  No, that didn't fix it.  I
checked the voltage at the pins of the floppy and sure enough 12.+ volts
on one and 5.+ volts on the other.  Well within margins.  Still no dice.
I disconnected the ribbon cable and tried to reboot.  The system
stopped, reporting some kind of an error with drive A so I know that at
least the system detected something there.  I hooked it back up as B:
and set the CMOS to swap drives, no dice.  I've tried 3 different floppy
boot disks, 1 DOS, 1 win95 and 1 Linux.  It doesn't even attempt to spin
them up.  It just skips them.  When I try to access /dev/fd0 from Linux,
I get "no such device"  same for /dev/fd1.  However dmesg reports
finding a fd0, says it is a post 1992 (??) drive and reports a 5 digit
number of some kind.

Barring the remote possiblity that the new drive has the same problem as
the old one, can anyone think of something else to try?  I looked at the
floppy (a generic one, Matsumi (Panasonic) I think) for jumpers but it
didn't have any.  

Thanks for any suggestions.

THe only thing I can think of is that the old floppy drive or MB died
and killed the other.  When I put the new floppy in, the MB killed it
and when I swapped MBs I now have a bad floppy.  ???

Thanks,
Jim.

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