Floppy drive controller broken?

[Nickel020]

For some time now, my floppy drive hasn't been working. I could still see it under Windows but whenever I put a floppy into it it said that there wasn't one. I tried another cable (yes, I made sure the "flipped" part was connected to the drive) and got the same error. So I bought a new floppy drive, but I get exactly the same error. I tried two different cables, in both directions. And I get the same result, no matter which way I plug in the cable.
What could this be caused by? Is it the floppy controller on the mainboard?

Thanks

 

[Nickel020]

*Bump*

 

[Zepper]

Windows has had terrible trouble with floppy disks since Win Me. Is the floppy recognized in the BIOS? Can you set your BIOS to try to boot from the floppy drive first? It answers are yes, then borrow a DOS boot floppy (one that's known to be free of viruses!!!) from a friend and try to boot with it. If it boots to the A: prompt, then you know the problem is in Windows. Go to the Windows Support Center for a place to begin troubleshooting.

.bh.

:moon:

 

[DaveSimmons]

One possible problem is the floppy drive mis-tracking / out of alignment and failing to read disks factory-formatted or formatted on other drives. If you put in a factory-formatted disk and reads fail, but the problem goes away after you do a full reformatting of the disk then that's the problem.

Drives just seem to fail, too, just like hard drives and optical drives. You might need to spend $10 on a new drive to find out for sure whether the problem is the drive or motherboard.