How to Install a Floppy Disk Drive

Step 8 – Install the Card Reader to a USB Port

This step is only required if you bought a floppy disk drive with an embedded card reader.

You must be very careful at this step because if you invert the card reader USB connector you may burn your motherboard USB port.

First take a good look at the USB connector from your card reader. You will see that there is some information printed on it, namely +5V, GND, D+ (or Data+) and D- (or Data-), see Figure 29. These pins must match the corresponding pins on the USB header. So be very careful.

Figure 29: USB plug from the card reader.

Now locate an empty USB header on your motherboard. They have the word “USB” next to them. See in Figure 30 that our motherboard had headers for both USB and FireWire (IEEE1394) ports. Be sure to use a USB header, not a FireWire one.

Figure 30: USB headers.

Look carefully to the USB header you are going to use. Notice that it has 9 pins arranged in two rows, one row with four pins and another row with five pins. So there is one “missing pin” at the end of one of the rows. This “missing pin” is pin 9, so the opposite side is the “pin 1” side.

Now you need to match the +5V pin on the cable, i.e., the red wire, to the pin 1 on the connector. Another way to say this is that the ground wire, which is black, must be next to the “missing pin.” We show this in Figure 31.

Figure 31: How to correctly install the USB cable to the USB header.

In Figure 32 you can see the USB cable correctly installed.

Figure 32: USB cable from car reader correctly installed.

Now put the case side panels back in place and screw them back to the case. Now you need to check if the motherboard setup is configured correctly.