VOGONS


First post, by i486_inside

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I have a 486 build with what i believe is a MB-4DUVC MODEL 1 motherboard, i have tried several floppy drives in it and two floppy controllers, and it still won't boot or read floppies, Does anybody out there know what the problem may be.

I know the cable isn't on backwards.
The drives always blink and make normal floppy drive clicking noises, but the the computer gives back "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER", and when i booted a hardrive that had dos on it, the computer would fail to read the disk also.

Reply 2 of 5, by Robin4

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Tried to clear cmos?? Maybe a bad eprom IC.. I dont know how long cmos chips lives.. But i dont think they will always be 100% good anymore on 25 years old hardware..
I also have weird problems with a 8-bit floppy controller with bios.. I think that the IC is just bad.. So i have made a copy of the bios and trying a fresh new eprom.

~ At least it can do black and white~

Reply 3 of 5, by i486_inside

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TheMAN wrote:

CMOS settings correct? if the floppy size is set wrong in the CMOS it could do this

floppy A is set to 1.44mb in the bios

I have also discovered that my board is actually a Chicony tk8498f.

List of thing that i have tried and failed to mention already.
Tried the drive at different positions of the cables
After changing the position of the drive i tried turning on drive B as a 1.44mb floppy
Have tried using swap floppy
tried a secondary power supply connected to the drive
played with turning the caches on and off
changed the bus speed between 25mhz and 33mhz
tried turning on VLB wait states
Tried with the VLB bus more than 33mhz jumper turned on
and various combinations of the previously mentioned
tried swaping positions of the controller card in the VLB slots
Tried turning the computer on with no other cards installed
Tried various memory configurations

Reply 4 of 5, by i486_inside

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I've tried several different floppy disk all of which should have been bootable
2x homemade dos bootdisks
1x harddrive utilites floppy
1x official dos 5 installer floppy
1x homemade dos 6.2 installer floppy

Reply 5 of 5, by Tiremaster400

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I too have a board that will not see any floppy. It is a Dell Optiplex Pentium II with on board floppy, I tried everything and wrote it off as a bad floppy controller, ended up using mass storage device with USB instead on WIN98. This was a computer with ALOT of hours on it and I think the actual semiconductors were worn out. It was a Keytrack machine from an automotive dealership that ran 24/7 for almost 10 years.