PC won't recognize floppys.....?

I've been having massive computer problems. I've spent hours on the phone with tech, and the need me to try and diagnos whats going on, via a memtest and hard drive test, which as most of you know needs to run from a floppy at startup. Well just to make my computer experience all the more enjoyable, it doens't seem to recognize the floppy. For instance, when I tried to install the hard drive test on the disk, it just kept telling me to put a disk in the drive (yet the light on the drive flashed and made the normal noices as if it was indeed installing. And yes, there was a disk. I also tried different ones).
Well anyway I went to the old family computer and made sucessfully made a disk on that. Howerver, when I booted up my computer w/ the new floppy in it, the test never initiates, as if its not even there.

Anyone heve any ideas before I spend another 2 hours on the phone?
(I'm running Windows XP, don't know if you need more info than that).

 

First a question or two........

What type of disk are you trying to make? Is it a 98 or ME start up disk? If not what is the program or utility are you trying to run specifically? Will the computer boot up normally? If it does, will it read a floppy? Are the utilities your are trying to run Windoze based or DOS?

 

I made a floppy for memtest86 and this program to test my hard drive. The computer boots up normally, but thats the problem; the programs are suppose to open when booting up.

 

Can this computer read a floppy disk in windows from "my computer" if it cannot open a floppy from there, then either the disk drive is broken or installed incorrectly.

If it can read a disk from there, then you simply need to adjust your boot order. Go into the bios when it's booting and make sure the disk drive comes before the HD's.

 

Ahhhhh damn thats what I expected. Floppy is set first for boot order. In my computer when I try to read a disk it just says "please insert disk into drive A."
What a decroded piece of crap.
Any suggestions?
And thanks anyway for trying to help.

 

All you can do is make sure it's hooked up correctly. Usually a simple way to tell is if the light is always on, that means the data cable is pluged in backwards.

Other then that all you can do is get a new floppy drive. Which on the bright side is really cheap.

Oh, and just incase you should check to make sure it is set as a 1.44 meg floppy in the bios and not a 2.88 or 1.2 meg drive. Most people never change those settings though so it's most likely not the problem.

 

No its neither of those...I'm not gonna by a new A drive though I have so many problems w/ this computer as it is (I can only run in safe mode 90% of the time due to crashing, won't get into that right now).
Well thank you all anyway.

 

You could always just take the floppy drive from the other computer and put it into this one for the tests and then put it back when done, if you don't want to spend any money. Also there is a chance it's a bad cable, so you could try switching the cables as well.

 

Besides basics like putting RAM in, I'm not very hardware inclinced. The A drive problem is just a relatively small one in the scope of things anyway (if I didn't have to test my harddrive, I would never use it anyway).