Jade Falcon wrote:

I'm not 100% sure if my ls120 drive is good or not. But I can't seem to be able to boot from it with floppy disks.
I have the bios set to boot form it, but it will work with any of my dos boot disks.
It there something I'm doing wrong?

Does it work from within an OS environment?
Can you use any of its disks (normal floppy disk or superdisk)?

Could you please provide the model number of your LS-120 drive? Iirc there were newer and older variants that may behave differently under some circumstances.

does the bios set it as a 3.5hd or ls-120? i remember back in the day my old ami bios had to be configured to ls-120 option. never had ls-120 disks tho.

The bios see's it as a ls120 drive, and it's a pata ls120 interface.

in windows 2k it shows up as a removable media drive, but can't read floppy's (need to format them)
I started to format a ls120 disk, but it was taking so long that I stopped it.

I give it a second try in windows. and will post the model of it latter.

Does normal floppys work (the 1,44 meg ones)? If not i suppose the drive is broken, or needs to be cleaned.

Roman78 wrote:

Does normal floppys work (the 1,44 meg ones)? If not i suppose the drive is broken, or needs to be cleaned.

I tried on, but windows say the disk need formatted. I did not try that yet.
Do 1.44mb disk have to be formatted in a ls drive to be use by one?

I hate to say it brother but I think you've likely got a bad drive if your also having issues within Windows. I worked at a computer shop during the peak of LS-120s lifespan and we advocated using them over ZIP drives so I've worked with them quite a bit. So i've worked with 100s of them first hand. (Although not so much recently) They do have a pretty high failure rate. I'd say 1 out of 5 failed in the first year. What I would always see when they hasd issues was pretty much exactly what your describing. Problems reading disks, saying they need to be formatted when they didn't, taking a long time to try and do anything, etc. It would look like it was working really hard but never get anywhere. The LS-120 should read any 1.44 floppy disk which was formatted by another PC without any issues.

Yeah I was thinking it was dead, but thought I'd ask as its the first one I ever had.
Any tips on with kind to buy or how to fix it?

The drive is a Matsushita LKM-F934-1

Old Floppy Interface LS-120 drives boot as normal floppy drives (Boot from A or B). ATAPI drives can boot as HDDs or SuperFloppies (No MBR in disk scheme) if you set the correct support in BIOS (Boot from LS-120/ZIP). SCSI LS-120 drive boot should be supported by the SCSI bios. Mylex and Adaptec BIOSes support this more or less.

Take in count that generally BIOS locks the drive if you use it as boot drive, or drive eject support is handled only via a full OS drive. So you will not be able to eject the disk during the whole session.

I can eject the disk in the bios with I have it set to boot from it.
could it be a pio or dma thing? Like do I have to set then up in the bios? of just keep it on auto?

I kind of want to just buy a older fdd ls drive just to keep things simple. I know there slow, but...

Ok so the drive is a bad. I pulled it to test the drive on another system and found a half missing smd restor. Well I was thinking of getting new caps for a few motherboards, might as well toss in a smd resistor as well.