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want to replace bad LS-120 drive with ordinary floppy drive - advice?
I have a Dell Dimension 4100 with Windows 98SE. It came with an LS-120 SuperDisk drive which also uses ordinary floppies. The drive was always finicky, and now it doesn't read any disks. I tried a disk drive cleaner, but that was a bad idea. I don't really need an LS-120 drive, so I figure all I want is to replace it with an ordinary floppy drive.
I've never bought internal hardware before, so I need advice about what I should look for and if there are any problems with what I want to do. I'll probably get someone else to do the replacement.
Message Edited by bananatron on 07-31-2003 12:57 AM
shesagordie
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July 31st, 2003 05:00
bananatron.
Any of these internal 3.5" floppy drives represented here, would be suitable and I would also, replace the Floppy drive ribbon cable.
http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductList.jsp?ThirdCategoryCode=010901
It's a easy project to replace a floppy and here are the instructions for replacing the drive in a D/4100.
http://docs.us.dell.com/docs/systems/dzuul/rr.htm#3_5_inch_diskette_drive
Bev.
bananatron
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July 31st, 2003 06:00
Is there some kind of messing around with CMOS or BIOS or whatever -- I have no familiarity with doing anything outside of the Windows environment. How about the drive letter currently assigned to the LS-120? How does that get reassigned to the replacement floppy?
I looked inside. I don't have a floppy ribbon connection to the LS-120. It is connected to the same ribbon as the hard drive. The other ribbon connects the DVD and the CD-RW drives. There is an empy slot beside the two ribbon slots on the motherboard, with the word "floppy".
I would like to add a second hard drive too, so I suppose the connection I free up by replacing the LS-120 can go to the second hard drive, true?
Message Edited by bananatron on 07-31-2003 02:48 AM
shesagordie
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July 31st, 2003 13:00
bananatron
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July 31st, 2003 19:00
JRosenfeld
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July 31st, 2003 22:00
Message Edited by JRosenfeld on 08-01-2003 12:11 AM
bananatron
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August 1st, 2003 01:00
JRosenfeld
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August 1st, 2003 12:00
The details in a BIOS set up vary somewhat from one system to another, but if you have the user's guide for your PC, it will have a section on it for your PC. It really is much easier to do than to describe and the screen has instructions at the bottom, plus help(F1). Immediately after switching on the PC, before the loading Windows screen appears, you have to press a key. It may say in the top right hand side of the screen what key to press for Set up (or it may say BIOS). In my case the key is F2, other systems use DEL or some other key. If you hit the right key in time, instead of loading Windows, the BIOS set up screen will appear. If you've never looked at your BIOS setup screen before, I suggest you try it and look through the entries, it tells you a lot about your PC. You can always quit without saving any of the changes that you might have made, so its quite safe!. There will be an entry for Drives (in my case it is called Drive Configuration, other BIOS screens may have a separate entry for floppy or diskette drives). Enter that and there will be a line for the floppy (in my case Diskette drive A) When there is no floppy in the PC, the entry for Diskette drive A will (should) say disabled or some equivalent wording. Toggling that entry using whatever key it says at the bottom of the screen shows the (usually one) alternative: 3.5" 1.44MB diskette drive or words to that effect. (if the motherboard supports two floppy drives, there will be a second entry for drive B: with only one floppy that should be disabled).
After you've installed the floppy is when you want to change that setting (some BIOS systems may be able to detect the floppy, in which case the setting will be changed automatically, but it is worth checking), then quit, saving the change. The system will then load windows which will detect the floppy. The worst that can happen, if you enable the floppy drive setting in the BIOS but the drive is not, or not properly, installed is that Windows will tell you that it hasn't found it. In any case, it is worth checking in device manager (right click my computer, click properties, choose hardware tab, click device manager) that it has found it and that it is installed properly (if not there will be a yellow or red mark against the entry for floppy disk drive).
Apologies if you already knew all this, but I got the impression that you didn't :)