Hm... tried another PSU?

no, but I did just make progress. It seems its very picky and for some reason the type of hard drive effects how the floppy responds.. my 1gb and 52mb ide drives created the same issue but for whatever reason I installed a 300mb drive and it worked all of the sudden with 1.44mb floppies. 1.2mb floppies are another matter as they are still only being seen as 360kb.

now if I have no hard drive at all installed both floppy drives work correctly

*edit*

NOPE, spoke to soon. the 300mb hard disk I installed was the original one that came with this PC. I replaced it because I felt it was to small. As I wrote above I went back to it and it booted up and fine into DOS 6.00 and the 1.44 mb floppy worked. wanting to start fresh I formatted the drive and installed DOS 6.22 which installed perfect. AFTER installation completed though and DOS booted from the hdd the floppy drives went back to being low density??? I'm completely stumped. could there of been some program that was allowing the drives to be HD until I reformatted and why in the world would that be the case?

soviet conscript wrote:

NOPE, spoke to soon.

Components drift off spec as they age. Caps are notorious, but even simple resistors do it. Trying another PSU is a good idea, also see if you can notice a pattern in the capricious behavior based on temperature and how long the board has been running. Also maybe look up what pin is Density Select and follow the circuit for cracks in the solder perhaps.

pewpewpew wrote:

soviet conscript wrote:

NOPE, spoke to soon.

Components drift off spec as they age. Caps are notorious, but even simple resistors do it. Trying another PSU is a good idea, also see if you can notice a pattern in the capricious behavior based on temperature and how long the board has been running. Also maybe look up what pin is Density Select and follow the circuit for cracks in the solder perhaps.

nope, just tested it with another completely working PSU and same issue

the only pattern I see is it works if no HDD is installed. It worked with the original 300mb drive that had dos 6 installed but when I reformatted that hard drive and installed 6.22 it suddenly sopped working correctly and seeing high density disks

Floppy controller and primary hard drive (controller and/or the drive too) share a few IO addresses. So it is not a good idea to connect floppy drives and hard drives to separate cards.

How are you connecting the floppy and hard drives, to a single multi-IO card?

What happens if you put the hard drive into secondary IDE port (master or slave does not matter, as long as it is not on the primary IDE port)?

Jepael wrote:

Floppy controller and primary hard drive (controller and/or the drive too) share a few IO addresses. So it is not a good idea to connect floppy drives and hard drives to separate cards.

How are you connecting the floppy and hard drives, to a single multi-IO card?

What happens if you put the hard drive into secondary IDE port (master or slave does not matter, as long as it is not on the primary IDE port)?

tried both. I used 2 separate I/O cards as well as the hdd on IDE2 and same thing.

the real mystery is why did the floppy drive act normal with the the original 300mb drive but started functioning as a 720k drive when I added a different hard drive and then when I formatted the drive? Only thing I can think of was maybe the 2M program was on the original drive so it was allowing it to act as a 1.44mb drive...but then it IS a 1.44mb drive so why would that be needed in the first place?