Floppy Drive

[Guitarstar]

My floppy drive has operated poorly since I loaded XP on my 770ED. I thought it was the drive itself and bought another one off eBay but it's just as bad. It takes several attempts to read a disk and XP can't make it format a disk for anything.

Any ideas ?

[farmer kev]

Is this when the drive is in the UltrabayII or connected by cable?
Is it a Ultrabay II drive?

I only have a guess, your externall cable is bad and if you are using it internally my guess is worthless.

Good luck and I hope somebody with more expertese adds their reply.

kev

[Guitarstar]

It's the stock external drive that can fit into the hard drive slot, I assume that means it's a Ultrabay II drive.

Is there a way to swap it with the hard drive and test whether it's the cable or the floppy drive itself ?

[farna]

If I were you I'd take the easy way out and buy a USB drive... assuming the 770 has a USB port. Could be the cable, connector, or controller on the MB. The only problem with this method is I don't think you can boot from a USB floppy. Easy way out: prepare a bootable CD. I'm not sure if you can boot "real" DOS (6.0 or later) from a CD -- someone was attempting that. If you can I'd prepare one just in case. Or just use a thumb drive for file transfer/temp storage and forget the floppy. If you need to save on something like disks use your desktop (assuming you have one!) to transfer from the thumbe drive. It could be a pain, but is a workable solution. Floppys are fast becoming obsolete -- many new laptops have no provision for one except the USB port.

The floppy fits in place of the HD, not the CD??? In either case, you can test the drive itself by booting from floppy if it replaces the HD (but that doesn't make sense...).

Speaking of the 770ED, this company has refurns for $279 with 30 day warranty. Sounds like a fair price if someone's looking for a relaible, cheap laptop. Come w/98SE installed, 64MB, 8GB HD.

[Guitarstar]

I meant swap the FDD with the CD/DVD.

I found some info on the Lenovo site :

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4YQHJY


I try a few things tonight and post a response if I get it working.