Multiple IDE drives + no floppy in Windows 2000?

[annac]

After connecting an ide hard drive, zip drive, cdrom and cdrw drive in a new Windows 2000 professional machine. My floppy fails to be recognized by either the motherboard or the OS. According to technet there is a work around that can be added to the registry to force dos to recognize the floppy if you have more than two IDE devices. Any ideas of what it is? I am using a Biostar M7VKL board and an AMD Duron 800 Mhz processor. If that info helps.

[AlienDyne]

First of all, I would check all the cables (IDE, FDD and power ones). Then the BIOS.

Have you checked all these??

[annac]

All cables and drives are functional. Even tried different drives and cables. Still same problem.

[ephmynus]

Have you ensured the cables are on the correct way? There should be no reason to go into the registry (that deals with Windows and not Dos) to recognize a floppy drive just because there are more than two IDE drives.

[annac]

Yes I am sure the cables are right. If you plug the floppy in backwards you get the constant "on" of the floppy light. I am feeling kind of wormy too! But according to Microsoft at www.technet, if you have more than two ide devices in windows 2000 you have to do some sort of convoluted registry workaround to get other drives to be recognized. Sounds like @#$%&* to me but that's what they say? Any other ideas?

[Dr Jam]

I would try disconnecting all you IDE devices and try to boot off a bootable floppy disk 1st.

If you can boot of it then add all your ide devices and try it again

If you can still boot then startup win2k.

and then see if you still have the fdd - Trying to discount physical errors

[Sowulo]

Originally posted by Annac:
<STRONG>Yes I am sure the cables are right. If you plug the floppy in backwards you get the constant "on" of the floppy light. I am feeling kind of wormy too! But according to Microsoft at www.technet, if you have more than two ide devices in windows 2000 you have to do some sort of convoluted registry workaround to get other drives to be recognized. Sounds like @#$%&* to me but that's what they say? Any other ideas?</STRONG>

Never heard of this "more than 2 IDE devices" thing.... I've got 3HD's, a CDRW, DVD, IDE Zip, & an IDE Tape in my W2K box and the floppy works fine.

I'm with Dr. Jam, remove the IDE devices and make sure the floppy works. If so, I'd try different combinations to try and discover if it's just one of your IDE devices that is somehow causing the problem.