Hardware Problem

["Rev_Icon@xxxxxxxxxxx" <Rev_Icon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, as most of you have heard I have been having some hardware problems
lately, first with a hard drive, and now with my floppy drive.  The hard
drive issue seems to be a problem within the hard drive, but the floppy
drive issue is somewhat baffling to me.

Originally, I had one 2.1g hard drive, and one 3.5" floppy drive
installed in my computer.  The hard drive was installed on IDE1 and the
floppy drive was connected to the floppy plug on my motherboard.

I removed the hard drive, and installed a 4.3g hard drive in it's
place.  This drive would not work correctly.  It would error out when
ever I tried installing Linux, Windows 95, and Windows NT.  I went to
the Maxtor web site (Maxtor made this drive) and found a program that is
supposed to aid in the setup of the hard drive named "MaxBlast".  I
installed this program but it did not help matters at all.  As far as I
can tell it didn't do anything.

I talked with Maxtor and they believe that the drive is to blame, and
not a setup issue.  They suggested sending the drive back to them and
they would replace it.  That sounded like a plan, so I pulled out the
4.3g hard drive and put my old 2.1g drive back in.  I turned the
computer back on and the light on my floppy drive came on and stayed
on.  I tried reading a disk from dos but I got an error saying that
there wasn't a disk in the drive.  I put a boot disk into the drive and
rebooted the system and the computer just started reading the disk and
never stopped.  I could hear the Floppy drive spinning, but the computer
booted like there wasn't a disk in the drive at all.

I went into the bios setup utility and checked my settings and
everything was exactly the same as when I started.  From the way the
disk drive was acting, I would have thought that the cable was on
backwards, but upon careful examination of the cables, they were as they
should be.  I got on the phone with Gateway 2000 technical support (my
computer is under warranty with them) and they said that it sounded like
the disk drive had gone bad.  They sent me a new one, and I replaced the
old one with the new one.  I powered the system back up and the same
thing happened again.  The new drive had no effect on the problem.  I
called Gateway back again and they said that they thought it was still a
bad drive issue and that they were sending me out a THIRD drive. 
Somehow I am starting to doubt that the floppy drive is at fault. 

Has any one had this problem before?  Does anyone have any ideas on how
to fix it?