System hangs when accessing floppies \ VOGONS

System hangs when accessing floppies

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First post, by iulianv

Posted on 2012-11-21, 13:01

iulianv Offline

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A few days ago I got a complete IBM PC Server 325 (8639-ES0), and after a whole week-end of (dis)assembling, dusting, washing and drying its parts I put it back together and started testing stuff...

The issue that's bothering me right now is that the thing hangs instantly when trying to access a floppy disk (and the FDD's LED remains lit). It only happens when there is a disk in the drive and it doesn't matter how I'm trying to access the floppy (reading in Win95, booting from it, formatting from a diagnostic tool I managed to boot from the CD). I tried different (known-to-be-good) floppy drives, floppy disks and floppy cables, but nothing changed - have you ever encountered anything similar?

With or without floppy I'm going to add the second PPro/200 CPU, another 64MB DIMM next to the existing 2*32 and maybe replace the 4.5GB SCSI HDD with a RAID array made of 3*4GB drives - after that, the question is: should I stick to WinNT4 or should I try Win2000? 😀

Reply 1 of 4, by Anonymous Coward

Posted on 2012-11-21, 13:59

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Sounds like a DMA problem.

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Reply 2 of 4, by Davros

Posted on 2012-11-21, 18:56

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you sure you got the floppy cable the right way

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Reply 3 of 4, by iulianv

Posted on 2012-11-22, 06:15

iulianv Offline

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Davros wrote:
you sure you got the floppy cable the right way

Yes, I'm sure - as I said, it only happens when I try to access an actual disk in the drive (if I'm doing nothing with the FDD its LED is off, and if I'm accessing it with no disk present it returns the usual not-ready/abort/retry/fail/etc message, and I can continue using the system normally).

Reply 4 of 4, by iulianv

Posted on 2012-11-26, 10:33

iulianv Offline

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Problem solved last night - there are three reserved 3-pin jumpers on the processor board, which I had taken out completely because the information available on their factory configuration was really scarce... but after some thorough digging I set them as shown in this link - http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/eprm/eprxa/12913.htm - and now I can use floppies on my server. Next step: 2nd CPU and 64MB more, and next step: SCSI RAID...

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