Bent floppy pin

[Medixen]

Alright, I just put my computer together and I got the old "floppy disk faliure 40" message. I then inspected the cable and the pins...I saw one bent pin in the area where you attach a floppy data cable. Now I bent it back into place and reattached the fdd cable. I have yet to power the system back up because I'm a wee bit paranoid. If that pin is still malfunctional, will it take out any other components in my system? Blah, hate to spend another $12 on a FDD, I'm cheap!

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Welcome to AT.

Do you even need the floppy drive?

 

[AwesomeJay]

i've fixed bent pins on floppy and hard drives and put them back in the system and it worked fine

 

[Medixen]

Yeah, I need the floppy drive because of the SATA drivers and I want to run memtest. It's worked for you jay? Good to hear, I'll give it a shot after dinner tonight.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

I just wanted to make sure you were actually going to use it before you went to the trouble

As long as you sucessfully bent the pin back into the correct position it should work just fine.

 

[cubby1223]

on very rare occasions I'll have a keyed cable but the board isn't, and I've purposely bent the pin out to make the cable fit. One row of the pins are all ground & all connected together anyways, so there are no problems.

 

[Medixen]

I actually bent the pin when I installed the FD data cable upside down. Whoops! I assumed it went in only one way and I got it right the first time.Well... I was wrong!

 

[XBoxLPU]

What motherboard?

I think most modern Nforce chipset boards have no need for SATA drivers during XP install. They basically emulate the drive as PATA and fake out XP..

There is a CD Image of Memtest on their site..

Hell DFI's latest beta bioses have memtest built into the motherboard....

 

[Medixen]

I got a MSI nfroce4 ultra board. I kept seesawing between the DFI ultra and MSI ultra. In the end I went with MSI because I felt the board might be more stable (i saw all the packaging/memory problems posted in there forums) and more newbie friendly. It's still not fully up and running, so I will see how user friendly it is...

As for the Sata drivers... I'm undecided about that one. I'm installing 1 Sata 250gb drive and I don't plan on using RAID. I have read in MSI forums that people have installed the drive with and without the drivers. So I might just let XP install the drivers. However... I have xp pro (it just says version 2002.. no idea if it has SP1) so I might hit the 137gb limit.

 

[the wombat]

My MSI K8N Neo4 Ultra (Same board as you, I think.) worked quite well for my first build. It was very user friendly IMO and I was able to get the whole build wrapped up in about half a day. I did have a few problems though...2 to be exact.

1. I didn't install the RAM correctly in the beginning and got the RAM error message on the D-Bracket that comes with the board. A little fiddling and pushing fixed that and I was on my way.

2. I couldn't install XP for the longest time. After navigating through the BIOS to see if it was a HDD problem, I realized that my NEC ND3520A wasn't showing up anywhere. Turns out the IDE cable was loose on the mobo.

Good luck!

Also, if you don't know if your XP xd is SP1 or greater just download an ISO off torrentspy or wherever you want. I think it should be legal if you have a valid serial number (that you payed for)

 

[grohl]

You guys want to cringe? I bent a pin on my BRAND NEW 3500+ proc last summer. Talk about sweatin' that one out. I carefully bent it back in place...works to this day.

 

[Medixen]

Just a lil update

With the pin bent back, I installed the floppy drive. She works like a fine young lass. She is currently running memtest... hopefully all will go well. Like to say thanks guys for all of your input. These forums and mechbgone's guide have helped me so much!

Also, I would've went insane if I had bent a pin on a 3500 proc... uh I would have nightmares of money flushing down the toilet.

Wombat: If I would've told my girlfriend that I did all that, she would've yelled at me for not paying attention during the install! But these things tend to happen though. Especially when you're not paying attention