Floppy drive stops working with Compact Flash to IDE adapter \ VOGONS

Floppy drive stops working with Compact Flash to IDE adapter

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First post, by Ace

Posted on 2013-01-30, 23:48

Ace Offline

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Posts: 529
Joined: 2010-10-16, 17:35
Location: Montreal, Canada

This is the biggest problem with my 486 build right now. Why would a Compact Flash to IDE adapter prevent a floppy drive from working? The seek light lights up, but the drive itself does nothing so long as I have that adapter in the computer's IDE slot (which is on an ISA card rather than the motherboard itself).

The Compact Flash card being used is a 1GB Transcend card. I had no problems getting it to work on a 1GHz Pentium III computer, but on this one, I can't even install DOS because the damn floppy drive doesn't want to work when this card and the adapter it's in are present. I can't even use my DOS installation from that Pentium III as all I get is a j rather than Starting MS-DOS... and DOS never loads. WTF? I didn't have this problem with an old 1GB hard drive, so what's the deal with this?

Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.

Reply 1 of 2, by Jepael

Posted on 2013-01-31, 09:58

Jepael Offline

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Joined: 2005-06-15, 19:28
Location: Finland

Is it the adapter or the CF card? What happens if you remove the CF card? The adapters are usually passive so I think it is not the IDE/CF adapter.

It might be your BIOS freaks out when it tries to detect the drive (card). Another card could work better.

It could also be some kind of hardware issue. Did you know that at least IO port 0x3F6 is shared between IDE drives and floppy controller, so perhaps there are some incompatibilities, caused by the combination of your multi-I/O card floppy controller and the CF card. The floppy controller uses some of the ports in the range of 0x3f0-0x3f7 while the IDE drive mainly uses ports in the range of 0x1f0-0x1f7 and possibly some ports in the 0x3f0-0x3f7 range.

If you can change the IDE adapter to be secondary controller address (0x170/0x370 baseport, IRQ 15), does it work any better?

Reply 2 of 2, by Hatta

Posted on 2013-01-31, 21:36

Hatta Offline

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Joined: 2004-02-15, 02:54

Does the CF-IDE use floppy power? Try booting it with the adaptor powered but without a data cable. That will tell you if it's an electrical issue.

Also, you can use a VM (virtualbox, vmware, etc) to install DOS on your CF card. Just plug it into your computer, and set up the VM to use the device in raw mode. You can work around raw mode by installing DOS on a disk image, then attach that disk image to a Linux VM, use 'dd' in the linux vm to create a disk image, and copy that disk image to the host machine. Then just use 'dd' to dump the disk image to the CF card. I actually never install dos from floppy anymore. I just keep disk images and use 'dd'.

Of course, the best thing to do is to get the floppy working. It's just not the same if you can't use real media.

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