Funny Story and Floppy Disk Drive Help

I installed one of my old floppy disk drives into this lady's computer that I was working on. So I got the thing to work and when the lady gets home she tells me first that the disk does not go into the floppy disk drive.

She said the only way she got the disk to go in was to flip the disk upside down. Come to find out she had the computer upside down trying to put the disk in the right way. So she gets it in and it gives the message that the disk need to be formatted. The damn thing was working when I first installed in now I am getting the same message. I am guessing there is a hardware malfuntion that was caused by her trying to force the disk into the drive. It spins and locks but does not read. The drive boots but does not read when the disk is in the computer during the BIOS either.

I am not fixing a computer again for someone as illerate as this ever again.

Any suggestions?

 

You said, "...the drive boots". Elsewhere, you say that the drive does not read the disk. I'll assume you mean that the system boots, but not from the floppy drive.

If the floppy drive won't read a disk at any time, but is recognised by the BIOS on boot-up, my guess is that your sweet little old lady threw the drive heads out of alignment when she tried to force a floppy into the drive in the incorrect orientation.

If the heads are misaligned, the drive will not be able to read what's on a disk written by a properly-aligned drive, but may still be able to write to a disk and read disks written by that drive only.

If so, the only practical fix is to replace the drive. Even a new one will cost far less than repairing the drive.

If you do it for her, I'll bet that you deliver the computer and set it up for her just to avoid further problems. Me -- I'd send her to a repair shop. It's not worth the grief.