Thanks for the response,
As it so happens, by accident, the two devices, floppy drive and fan
controller, are on different power strands. In fact, there is nothing else
on either of the power strands.
In any event, the fact that the floppy drive failure didn't happen when the
everything was connected the same way but the floppy was outside of the case
would seem to rule out power noise in the cable (right?).

"Hank" wrote in message
...
Where you getting the power for the speed controllers? Ummmmmmm..........
let me guess, off the same one that feeds the floppy?

"Andrew Diamond" wrote in message
. ..
My thesis, which will sound nutty, is the following: The use of my
Vantec
Fan Controller to turn down the speed of my two intake 80mm case fans
causes
my floppy drive to fail. I will defend this below but now for the
setup,
pathology, and history.

Setup:
I recently installed a Vantec Silver Nexus NXP-205 Rheobus (with 4 fan
controllers) in my Kingwin K11 case. This case comes with 4 80mm fans
two
of which are intake fans that sit at the bottom front of the machine.
Not
much above these fans is the 3.5 inch drive external bays. The bottom
bay
contains my Vantec fan controller and the one immediately above that has
my
floppy drive. These two intake fans, that are close to the floppy
drive,
are attached to the first two of the 4 fan speed controllers. The other
two
controllers are attached to the other two distant case fans but
apparently
have no effect adverse on my floppy drive (regardless of how I set their
speed controllers).

History/pathology:
The two intake fans are the loudest. I experimented with turning their
speed down by setting their fan controllers to the lowest setting and
noticing that the system temperature was not adversely effected (even
though
it was clear from the noise attenuation that the fans turned much much
slower). I don't use my floppy drive much but eventually, over a few
weeks,
when I did I noticed it behaved erratically. I did not think for a
moment
that these two things were related. Specifically, some boot floppies (3
different ones) wouldn't boot almost all of the time. I thought the
floppies were bad but they booted in other machines.

I decided to quickly bypass this problem by making a boot CD from the
floppy, one that same computer because it had the burner, using Nero CD
burner, but when I tried that it couldn't read the files from the floppy
or
of that floppy's copy. I tried this multiple times.

To me, from my experience, this indicated that the floppy drive was
probably
bad (versus the motherboard or the cable).

However, when I swapped the floppy with that from another computer the
supposedly bad floppy drive worked great.

So, I figured it must be the floppy cable but when I tried the original
floppy cable with the original floppy drive on the second computer it
still
worked great!

Maybe a bad MB, hard to believe, so now I was confused so I reattached
that
cable and floppy to my original machine but I decided, really out of
laziness, to leave the floppy drive outside the case on a mat. This
time
everything worked. I booted it to the floppy no less than 10 times with
no
problem (taking this floppy out and putting it back in - rebooting by
power
off, reset and CTRL-ALT-DEL).

I booted up into Win2k and using Nero I was now able to make my boot CD
from
this floppy. I did this multiple times.

I then repeated this whole process a few times removing the floppy from
the
drive bay (but still having it attached) and then putting it back in. I
even removed it from the case out the front still leaving the cables
attached so I wouldn't have to remove and reattach the floppy cables as
that
could theoretically be another source of error. Every time when the
floppy
drive was in the case it wouldn't work but when it was outside the case
it
would.

Couldn't believe it!

Finally, with the floppy drive installed in the drive bay, I turned up
the
fan controllers of the two intake fans all the way and NOW I was able to
use
Nero to successfully create the boot CD from the boot floppy.

I did this test multiple times. When I turned the two (front) fan
controllers all the way up the floppy always worked but when I turned it
all
the way down it always failed. It seems to fail even if the fan
controllers
half way but does work if its about 2/3 way.

Then I tried turning the other two fan controllers all the way down with
the
intake fan controllers all the way up. This worked fine. But when I
turned
one of the intake fan controllers all the way down the floppy failed.
Here's
a table:
The first four columns are the settings of fan controller 1 through 4
respectively (values: B - bottom power, T - Top Power, H - Half Power,
2 -
2/3 Power). The fifth column is whether the floppy drive failed
(values:
F - failed, W - worked)

B B T T F
T T B B W
B B H H F
2 2 H H W
B T H H W
T B H H W
T B B B F

Conclusion:
So clearly, there is a problem related to the Vantec Fan controller
controlling these fans but after that I don't know what to say. The
tests
"B B T T F" and "T T B B W" indicate that the problem is context
dependant
on which fans are being controlled. Specifically, turning the first two
fans, the ones close to the floppy drive, down will create a floppy
failed
while turning down the other two fans may not. However "T B H H W" and
"T
B
B B F" indicate that the problem is NOT related to those two close
intake
fans because they were set the same in both tests but setting the far
two
fans low caused a failure.

Ummm.