Hello, took an old 3.5" floppy drive from a gateway tower that was collecting dust in the parents basement. Was pretty sure it worked when we stored the tower. I hooked it up in and put power to it on my tower and "Enabled" the option in Bios for Floppy disc controller. Saved changes. The mobo will post but usually instead of windows logo I get a black screen. No windows. I let it sit there for a good minute, reset the PC "Disabled" Floppy- saved changes and windows boots like normal. Whats going on here?

welcome kraftwerka... i thank they are real busy right now... they will be with you in a minute... L

It sounds like your PC may be trying to boot from the Floppy drive. Did you check under the boot menu yet to see which is the first boot device?

Thanks for the replys. Yes- the boot device order is 1)Hard drive 2)Cd-rom 3)"1st Floppy" - almost like its reading more than one? Maybe because the floppy drive was running on a windows 98 setup when it was installed on the gateway, and its not compatible with xp pro? Is it common for these to break? Trying to save current bios on a floppy then flash to a new one hence why I need the floppy to work.. So many issues argh!

Is the indicator light on the FDD burning continuously??

A floppy is a floppy so it doesnt matter were it came from. Having said that what cable are you using some of the old floppies had a adapter on the back for a flat connector and some have pins and some cables are straight and some have a crossover wire in the middle.

Using the cable from the gateway would be your best bet there used to be various ways floppies were setup so you could have A: + B:.

If there are two connectors on the cable try the other one. You should see the light come on at boot up unless you have disabled the seek at boot time, it should then go off. I fit stays on its connected wrong

Well it has the old 34pin ribbon cable- would you call this an IDE? Or IDE is named strictly for the master/slave disc drives? - Little o/t I was just curious. The ribbon cable has a red stripe on the very left. I looked in my motherboard manual and it says to put the red marking side of the cable to pin one. Did it and still nothing.
Cobracon- Its funny after the motherboard post, the light comes on for a second then off to the black screen.