I think "You might check your other boxes" means look and see if the missing
drive was transplanted into another computer case and then forgotten.

However, I was surprised to find that my Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 machines do
not find the floppy drive! My Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) does find the floppy
drive and read the diskettes. I had not noticed before as I almost never
have reason to use floppies, which are pretty much obsolete anyway. Flash
drives are faster, much higher capacity and cheap - I remember paying over
$40 for a box of 10 5 1/4" single sided diskettes.