Floppy Drive goes boom

I manged to fry (as in toast, sparks, smoke, and that rotten burnt silicon smell) a floppy drive the other day. Not too exciting picture-wise, but it was an exciting experience.

I was performing a BIOS upgrade and needed a floppy drive, which the power supply doesn't have the floppy power connector… So, I made one out of a 4-pin CD-ROM to sound card cable.

The cable was sound (get it?), but I managed to hook it to the floppy drive upside-down (no tabs on it, since it was an audio cable in the first place). The way the pinouts on power connectors work is +12 volts, then ground, then ground again, then +5 volts.

I'm guessing it didn't like +12 volts going through the +5v circuit :-) Fortunately, I had another floppy drive laying around (the better of the two, as "better" as floppy drives go) and was able to get it working with no problems.

BTW, a friend of mine gave me one of those Iomega USB 128-MB keychain drives. I started out trying to use it, but couldn't get it to boot off the USB device because I had copied the wrong DOS boot disk to it. It comes up as a standard hard-drive in BIOS (believe that?) These things are really useful!

-Chris