- If you have a floppy disk drive and want to find the header on the motherboard, begin by opening the computer case. Find the back of the floppy disk drive and look for a flat ribbon cable. Follow that to the header on the motherboard. If your computer doesn't have a floppy disk drive and you want to see whether it has a header so you can add one, look for the ribbon cable from the hard disk. It is similar to the floppy disk drive cable, and the FDD header is often adjacent to the IDE/ATA hard drive headers. The FDD header is also generally marked on the motherboard with "FDD" or "FDD1," "FDD2," etc. if there are multiple headers. If you still can't find the FDD header, refer to the owner's manual for the motherboard.
- If you're adding or changing a floppy disk drive cable, be careful to orient the cable correctly in the header. Failure to do so can bend or break the pins. The ribbon cable will have a polarity stripe on one edge. If replacing an old cable, note the location of the polarity edge when removing and insert the new cable into the header the same way. If there is no cable, check two things. First, the header has a notch with a corresponding key in the cable which must line up. Second, there may be a small number "1" printed on the motherboard next to the corner of the FDD header. The polarity stripe on the cable should be on the side with the "1."
- A typical FDD cable will have five connectors: one to the motherboard and a pair of connectors for drives "A" and "B." Three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk drives and 5.25-inch floppy disk drives use connectors of different sizes; many cables have two of each. You may notice a twist in the cable between the "A" connectors (at the opposite end from the motherboard connector) and the "B" connectors (in the middle). By default, many floppy disk drives left the factory with their jumpers set to function as a "B" drive. The twist in the cable switches the wires so a drive set as a "B" will function as the "A" drive. Thus, the drives can be switched from "A" to "B" without changing the jumpers but just by moving to the other connector.
- If your new computer doesn't have an FDD header and you need to access data on a floppy disk, USB floppy disk drives are available commercially. If you need to replicate the functionality of a floppy boot disk, many newer computers can boot from other devices such as CDs and DVDs, external hard drives and USB flash drives.
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