making flippy floppy

January 4, 2008 6:56 AM

My Computer detects a floppy drive when there isnt one installed .........

Hi i'm running windows xp home - i have one sata drive and one scsi drive ( i think its called that - the older version of hard drive) i also have a cd/dvd.

what happens is :

the computer detects both hard drives ok but it detects the cd/dvd player without giving you access it says "please insert a cd" without letting you in, if theres something in there , it deosnt see it - it also detects a floppy disk drive, when lo and behold theres no physical floppy disk drive there at all.

I'm looking to get rid of the floppy and get the cd/dvd working - i've tried removing it in device manager and also booting without the sata hard drive.

posted by sgt.serenity to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I'm guessing your older drive is IDE, not SCSI. It sounds like you need to go in to your BIOS and A) Disable the floppy drive and B) Set the IDE channel that your CD drive is in to "Auto-detect" or something of that nature. Assuming someone reasonable set up your computer, your HDD is the master on the primary channel, and the CD drive is either the slave on the primary channel (they'd share a cable in this case) or the master on the secondary channel (they'd be on separate cables).
posted by 0xFCAF at 7:22 AM on January 4

Did you plug your CD drive into the floppy slot on your motherboard? This is doable if you apply enough force to bend a pin.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:59 AM on January 4

Heh. You kids probably can't imagine it, but the computer has no way to detect whether a floppy drive is installed. It's such ancient technology that you need to explicitly enable/disable in your computer's BIOS setup.

[Cue lame stories about the fun times spent trying to get some piece of hardware working back in the times of pre-PnP ISA]
posted by themel at 8:09 AM on January 4

Disable the floppy controller in BIOS, as themel and 0xFCAF.

You cannot plug an IDE cable for a CD/DVD into a floppy header because the floppy header has about 1/4 fewer pins. I'm thinking this problem is unrelated to the floppy issue, so feel free to update here once the floppy thing is taken care of.
posted by rhizome at 8:15 AM on January 4

sure, i've got rid of the floppy thing in the bios - it now detects the two hard drives but now instead of one cd drive it detects two.
posted by sgt.serenity at 9:02 AM on January 4

and if i unplug everything except the old drive it still detects a cd drive .
posted by sgt.serenity at 9:33 AM on January 4

Software CD emulation like Daemontools or something that comes with your CD burning software, like Nero ImageDrive?
posted by themel at 9:50 AM on January 4

problem solved - it was the cd burning program that created the ghost drive - i deleted the program and the drive went away.
posted by sgt.serenity at 10:36 AM on January 4