Help with 5 1/4 inch floppy drive?????

Q: My dad had 1000's of old 5 1/4 inch floppies and i wanted to put them to use...One day i looked in the basement and i found a 5 1/4 in. drive and its cables!!!!! I tried installing the drive and it didnt work. I fiddled w/ the CMOS and gave me 4 options for drive A and B: 3.5 inch 1.44MB 3.5 inch 2.88MB 5.25 inch 360K 5.25 inch 1.2MB I tried ALL of those and the little red light on the drive went on but the computer gave me this depressing message: Floppy disk(s) fail (C0) Press F1 to continue,press DEL to enter setup. PLEASE ANSWER THIS QUESTION!! If its a fake answer I WILL REPORT U Btw the little red light was on the whole time my computer was on. I WILL REPORT YOU IF U SAY ANYTHING LIKE "THEY R USELESS THEY HAVE 1.2 MB"BCUZ THEY R NOT NEW THEY R OLD ONES THAT IM TRIED READ INFORMATION OFF.THX TO EVRY ONE W/ A REAL ANSWER also i tried reversing the cable that connected to the motherboard but it was keyed so i reversed the end that connects to the drive. The red light went out but the error message stayed,so i pressed F1 to go to Windows. I looked in Device Manager and found the "Floppy Drive Controller". It had a picture of a drive next to it but it also had a little yellow circle w/ a exclamation mark instde. I tried disabling it (the exclamation mark turned to a red "X" then back to the exclamation mark). So i went to "Add device wizard" and found this message: "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" Plz note the "code 10" is similar to the "C0"when the computer started up. I tried help and support which was not useful at all.... :(

A: Sounds like a cabling problem. The berg connector (the end that fastens to your motherboard) could be reversed. Some of them were keyed so you couldn't insert it backwards, but some were not. The edge of the cable that corresponds with pin 1 should be colored in some manner. Look at the mother board -- in very tiny lettering you may see one end of the socket marked with a "1". The end that connects to the drive almost certainly has a key -- there should be a slot cut into the board that the cable slides over. Also, with a device that old, chances are pretty good that it's gone bad anyway.

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