What the floppy!?!?

[Michael Hetes]

I have a very old PC that has been seriously upgraded, so much so that it may no longer be considered a Compaq (or anything else). The original owner replaced EVERYTHING inside the case with the possible exceptions of the floppy drive and the power supply. It now utilizes a Celeron 333 processor and a 100mHz bus . . . and a motherboard of unknown origin.

It's this "motherboard of . . . " that may be the issue here, and I'm unsure how to handle this. Even though it has a newer processor it still has an old "standard" keyboard connector jack. The mouse is connected via a PCI accessory-card slot ribbon, and it has a hybrid ISA/PCI slot arrangement. The machine originally had both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch floppy drives, but now only sports the latter. In addition the 3 1/2 was changed from an Epson, which was having problems, to an NEC.

What is happening is a failure of either the BIOS or Windows 98SE to recognize the correct drive assignment for the 3 1/2" floppy drive. If I set up the CMOS assignment to letter "B" it sees it as assigned to address "A", and will not operate. If it is set up for letter "A" it registers as a 5 1/4 inch drive at address "A", which it isn't, and -- again -- will not operate. (In neither scenario does anything show up at "B".) The ONLY way to get the floppy to work at all, it seems, is to set up (through the CMOS) BOTH drive addresses "A" and "B" for 3 1/2 inch drives, even though there is only one drive present.

I have gone into the Device Manager and deleted BOTH the drive and the standard floppy controller several times and used the "Add New Hardware" control panel to find everything all over again. I even copied and renamed the Hardware Configurations and allowed Windows to recreate a new "Original" one. Each time the result has been the same.

Short of reinstalling Windows 98SE, which I doubt will cure this problem, is there something that I may have overlooked? Besides, that is, of also putting that 5 1/4 back in.

[Bostjan Kosi]

Hm...Check for correct cabling. If this is to be A than it should be on the end of the cable (not shure, if I remember right) You must get an FDD cable with correct connectors. Note that old cables had few wires twisted after the first pair of connectors....so check cabling....Also on some FDD drives I remember there used to be jumpers for primary/secondary...check for that also..just in case.

BR.

[Michael Hetes]

Thanks, Bostjan, you appear to have been at least partly right about the floppy cable. The only thing I had to do in addition was to reset the Advanced CMOS settings to their default, in particular one called something like "Auto Floppy Search" (to Disabled). Once that was done the drive showed up with the right address. Thanks again.