Are you sure that it's set up correctly? Card might be conflicting with other devices. Try locating it here http://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/i/iio16_t.htm .

Well, It only had 2 jumpers related to floppy interface. First one is enable/disable jumper and second one is address jumper. If I change either of those the bios doesn't find the floppy drive at all during post. I don't see any goldstar cards on that web page.

This any closer? http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy- … -IDE-AT-32.html

It doesn't necessarily have to be floppy drive settings. You could have a resource conflict elsewhere.

Jumper settings for the floppy interface are close to same as in my card.

Is this card and a VGA card the only two cards in your system? Motherboard typical 486 era?

CMOS battery still good? Is it retaining your 1.44MB 3.5" setting and not reverting back to a default of 1.2MB 5.25" after saving and exiting BIOS?

Yeah, when testing this card and the vga card have been the only cards. I have one 386 motherboard and two 486 motherboards that I have tested it with. Unfortunaly the motherboards don't have batteries yet because the new batteries I ordered have not come yet. They still seem to remember their bios floppy setting when they reboot because when the cmos gets reset the default seems to be that the system has no floppy drives at all. Also it shows 1.44MB floppy drive in the table above when it starts to try booting from the disk and gives "drive not ready" error.

I have a couple of Biostar 486 motherboards that fail to boot when they have no CMOS battery. Even though they appear to be remembering the FDD settings correctly, they get stuck while booting with the light on like it's happening to you, or in some cases it fails POST with "FDC controller error". As soon as I put a battery, they boot just fine.

I don''t get floppy controller errors. I only get the error when it actually tries to read the disk to boot. The floppy drive light lights up and the floppy drive drive also makes sound when it is suppose to start reading the disk.

I know this is an old thread, but I have stumbled upon it while trying to resolve my own related issue. Goldstar Prime 2 IO card. It gives me "Drive Not Ready" errors trying to boot from 5.25" floppies. I tried 3 different drives. I tried the drives on a newer Socket 7 machine and they work. So I eventually gave up and used a 3.5" drive. But I had to try 4 of them before I found one that booted and allowed me to install DOS on the machine.

So now I'm able to boot the machine from HDD so I'm going back and trying the 5.25" drives again.

There appears to be something about this IO card that dislikes many floppy drives. I'm eager to hear if anyone has wisdom or ideas on how to troubleshoot.

I cannot say I have had any floppy issues with the Goldstar Prime2(C) cards, when I have had drive issues it was always the drive itself. But I have recapped all my IO cards and this chip is found in bottom barrel cards which have the worst capacitors imaginable and there's a good chance this might be why there are problems.

Tiido wrote on 2021-07-09, 07:00:

I cannot say I have had any floppy issues with the Goldstar Prime2(C) cards, when I have had drive issues it was always the drive itself. But I have recapped all my IO cards and this chip is found in bottom barrel cards which have the worst capacitors imaginable and there's a good chance this might be why there are problems.

Thanks. I realized I was using a very long ribbon cable and not the short cable it came with so weak signal crossed my mind and the train of thought led me to wonder about the capacitors. I did manage to get a drive sort-of working. But I found that I had to set the jumper to drive 2 even though it was drive 1 and on the drive 1 position on the cable, and that will only work with 1.2MB disks even though the same drive can read 360k 2S/2D disks when installed in other machines. BIOS has support for 360k drives so I doubt it is the fault of BIOS.

In any case, it gets me through my current struggle. Thanks for the input. I'll probably change the caps and see if that helps anyway.

These old IO cards often have damaged tantalum/ceramic capacitors you may not notice at first. I got one a few days ago and it was flaky, turns out one of the caps was chipped. I recapped it and it works fine now.