You won't be able to do the USB pen drive idea, as you'd need to have the machine booted up into windows for it to be accessible as a drive, so that idea's out.

Your problem with the floppy sounds like:

Your floppy drive is disabled in the BIOS of the motherboard. (Enter your BIOS setup, and check to be sure the floppy drive is enabled, AND that your machine is set to first try booting from the floppy before trying to boot from the hard disk. Note: Usually the Boot options for your motherboard's bios are on a different page than where you enable the drive, so be sure to look through your bios setup screens quite thoroughly for something like 'Boot order', or 'Bootable devices' or something similar).

The ribbon cable is plugged in backwards, flip it so the 'red line' is on the opposite side of where it is now.

The ribbon cable is not plugged into all the pins. (Check to be sure it is completely pushed into the drive, and motherboard).

The power cable is not plugged into the floppy drive properly. (Check to be sure it is firmly inserted, and that all 4 pins are actually lined up with the holes in the plug.

Hope I've helped, good luck getting back up and running.

Ok thank you very much for your, im pleased to announce after your advice i finally got that pc 2 realise that the floppy drive is there. Now for my last hurdle. I need a boot disk. I have been to www.bootdisk.com and downloaded the OEM versions of 98 and ME, but to no avail. Everytime i put the floppy drive in i get a message 'Disk I/O Error, replace the disk, and then press any key'

From my previous knowledge this should not come up as the boot disk should just load up. Any tips or advice, perhaps a different bootdisk from another website.

Thanks again and await your replies.

Hmm, you actually made the bootdisk? You don't just copy the file you downloaded to the disk, did you? That won't work, if that's what you did. You must actually put a blank formatted floppy into your drive, then run the program you downloaded, it will create a boot disk.

Hope that's what you needed, let us know if that wasn't the problem.

I downloaded the program, which extracted all the files (i assume all the files) onto the disk. I then placed that disk into my dodgy pc. I hope that info helps you

You've verified that that floppy drive can read disks? And that that floppy is readable?

When you boot the second machine, does the floppy drive on that machine light up, then does the light go out after it fails booting? Or does the light just remain on? (That would be a sign that the ribbon cable is installed backwards, flip it over).

The error you're getting would be indicative of the drive finding the disk unreadable. I can think of any number of issues that could cause this:

The floppy disk isn't formatted correctly, or is bad. - check to be sure you can actually READ the disk on the machine that is working now.

The floppy drives heads are dirty, and are having problems reading due to that.

Floppy drive has failed due to age or other issues.

Check to see if you can boot your working machine with that disk, if it'll boot, then your other system should be able to boot with it. I'd be considering radical things like:

Swap the floppy drive you know is working in the machine that is functional into the machine that isn't working right so you can boot it and get this done. (Heheh).

Good luck.

Cool! Off i go 2 try them things out! Your a star!

Double check to make sure your BIOS is set to boot from the floppy first.

How old is the system?

I've taken recent (<3 years old) systems and booted them from a USB pen drive. Those pen drives are what the computer industry wants to supplant floppies, I think.

Really? Can't do that in mine, wish I could. (Maybe it needs to be USB 2.0? I'm stuck with USB 1.x).