Apple IIe won't read floppy disks

Welcome to the Apple II world. You'll find there is a vibrant user community that is actively developing new hardware and software for it.

The behavior you're seeing is pretty typical of the startup when there's no (readable) disk in the drive. It'll spin forever until it's able to read something, or you hold down the Control key and hit Reset. It sounds like the interface card and the drive are probably healthy, since it starts up when you turn on the power.

As you suggest, there are several things that can be at fault here:

1. The disks may be bad, or not formatted, or not formatted for Apple IIs.

2. The drive may need to have its head cleaned. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMF3PL17kqg

If you put the Super Serial card back in, you can try bootstrapping via serial port - and then formatting one of those disks to see if you can get any farther. See:

http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/bootstrap.html

That's the best price to get an old Apple for! But now you're spoiled - you'll want them all to come that way.

Come to KansasFest! We always have plenty of Apple II hardware looking for a good home, and experts who are able to fix what once went wrong. :-)