actually, i had connected my floppy cable upside down in the process of swapping drives around, which is why the light was solid :|. put in the right way, there seems to be no power to the drive at all. no seek from the boot block. bricked...

reason: there's no power to the board. hotwiring it isn't going to get the read info. shorting things would only be useful if it's not reading from boot block at all, which i'm not convinced is it.

see, i may have two damaged drives. the pins on both are bent all around. in contrast, the cd-r powers up, through ide or through sata. i'm not convinced it's reading anything, especially through sata, but it spins and flashes and turns the fan on and stops. it doesn't seem to matter what disc is put in...so that seems more like firmware...

...but it powers up. neither floppy does.

i've also determined that at least one of the floppies i was using is unstable. i could have several bad floppies. the copy operation seems fine for about ten minutes, then seems to evaporate. like, i'll do a format /u and copy the rom over and three hours later will get read errors on that disk in that drive.

it's tedious, and i don't think it's the problem, but i have to determine the integrity of the floppy disks before i give up on this approach.

i then have to try every cd-r/cable combo i have.

however, i am currently resigned to reprogramming the chip.