The Floppy that just keeps searching

my friend has an old slow computer, and its worked fine for him for the last 4 years, but now his floppy drive just wont work right.
Stick in a floppy, and the light just stays on, it makes no noise, and the Hour glass mouse pointer just sits there, and it'll do it for hours on end and never get access to the floppy,

I personally think its either DEAD, or severly dirty, either way I'm getting him a new one, I just wondered what you guys thought?

Well, aside from the fact that your floppy disk cable is the wrong way round, I think either the drive or the cable has had it.

Its best to replace both the drive and cable. They are not expensive and that way you should be sure that it works, unless of course you have a faulty floppy drive controller, in which case a seperate PCI or ISA card (probably taken from some old 486) is your only way to go.

have you tried different floppy disks? I had a disk that just died on me and it did the same thing that you just descibed on 3 different computers. At first it was the drive but after I tried it on a second computer and then a third computer I concluded that the disk was bad.

If it's not the cable or the configuration, a floppy is cheap enough.

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Thanks,
Its definitly not the cable, as its been hooked up(and never un-hooked) for 4 years and never once malfunctioned before, I'll just get him a new drive, thanks for your responses:grinthumb

so is my ASUS 52x CD-ROM cable. i've never unplugged it, but one day, it start to do funny things. swapping the cable cured it.

I think it's the floppy disk itself. I've often experienced the OS telling me the floppy disk needs to be formatted even though I just did it a second ago. I take it that floppy disks are losing their integrity and have reached their limits.

Even the installation disk that came with my new harddrive was unreadable and I had to download the utility from Maxtor's site and save to disk again.

You know, we replaced the floppy, and it still didnt work....so i did what i should have done in the beginning, and disabled all programs that start up automatically when pc is booted.And it ended up being Norton Antivirus, lol. But thanks for the help

Thanks for posting your solution.
Quite strange that Nortom was causing this problem..

Try the cable, they only cost a couple of quid. Failing a new drive is only about a tenner, and they do get quite dusty after a few years.