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440BX chipset with 2 floppy drives issues?

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First post, by cj_reha

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I tried installing a TEAC 5.25" floppy drive into my Windows 98 gaming box a little bit ago and it went weirdly 😜

So, first of all, the board is an ABIT BE6 motherboard with the Intel 440BX chipset. I vaguely remember reading something about this chipset having issues with having 2 floppy drives on one cable, Googling it reveals mixed responses.

Anyways what happened was I set up both drives in BIOS and they appeared in 98. Moving over a program on a 3.5 floppy disk, I got this weird error and then it asked me if I wanted to format the floppy. I don't remember the exact error but I do remember I could not read the disk.

Uninstalling the 5.25 drive and leaving the single 3.5 drive in restores it back to being able to read the disks.

I have a spare LS-120 drive I tore from a Gateway machine, will this work as a workaround since it will be treated as an IDE device?

Thanks.

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Reply 1 of 3, by Deksor

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A bit like IDE drives with master and slave, floppy disk drives can be configured by jumpers. I've never encountered a situation where a FDD drive doesn't work due to this, but I've heared of this and this might be your problem. Sometimes you have real jumpers on your floppy drive, and some other times you have to hardwire/solder the jumpers on the PCB

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Reply 2 of 3, by cj_reha

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Problem solved. I installed the LS-120 drive in, and it does read both 720K DD and 1.44MB HD disks. The 5.25 drive reads disks great as well.

😁

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Reply 3 of 3, by Tetrium

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I don't remember having any such issues when I was using 2 floppy drives in my BX rig. Actually I was using 2 FDDs and an LS-120 😁

As already has been mentioned, some floppy drives have jumpers or those very tiny switches to select different settings kinda like IDE drives do (especially the older floppy drives have this, like drives made roughly before 95 or so), have a good look at your floppy drives and maybe have a good look at your floppy cable.

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