presario 1925 drive problems?

a few months ago, I bought a used Presario 1925 laptop, with the detachable
DVD/floppy drive wedge. Other than the battery only giving about 5 minutes
of operating time, and the DVD only playing about 10-15 minutes before it
starts skipping and finally locks up, I've been pleased with it, and have
simply deleted the DVD software, since it can read CDs without any
difficulty. However, this morning I noticed that it no longer reads the
floppy disk. I hear it spinning, but after a few moments I get a "disk not
available" message. I ran a cleaning disk thru it, but that didn't help. The
floppy drive shows up in Windows Explorer, but the laptop won't boot from a
diskette on power-up either. I took the wedge apart, but everything looks to
be connected, and the CD drive is still working. Looks like I might be in
the market for a new wedge, although for now I can still use the laptop. My
question: is there some known failure mode that could account for the floppy
drive suddenly failing, when it has rarely been used?

m9876c at yahoo dot com