Hey all, this isn't so much a linux question as just a general hardware question.
I've built both my machines, each with a cdrw and a dvd rom. each also has a floppy drive.
All jumpers are set to master/slave and the floppies are, to the best of my knowledge configured properly. However, when I try to use the slave drive on either machine they lock up and when trying to access the floppy on either, I can niether read from nor write to the disk. All hardware was new at installation. I have swapped out all, with known working devices with the same results. It is not OS specific as the same occurs under Winblows. One has 512MGb and the other 834 MGb memory.
Any ideas on what I have to do or undo to get my systems working properly ???

Thanks

Does any of the drives show up in the BIOS?

All drives are present in bios and Winblows device manager. Also present in Suse 9.3. That's why it all is so confusing, I can't seem to find anything wrong, strange huh ?

Check out the cables connecting them to your motherboard. They not be fully inserted or you may have a faulty cable or cable connector.

The floppy cable should have a twist in the middle on the drive side of the cable.

Could it simply be that your drives are not included in your fstab file (in the /etc directory) and therefore are not being mounted at startup? If so, you can manually mount them. What are the results of running "fdisk -l" (that's a lowercase "L") If fdisk sees them correctly, then that could confirm a possible fstab issue. -- J.W.