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HP Vector XM2 (486) won't recognize floppy drive

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First post, by thenix

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I got an old HP Vectra computer that didn't have a floppy drive in it. I put one in and started it up and it always goes through a hardware check before it starts. During this check it failed the floppy drive with a general error saying something is wrong. If I look in the bios I can change the setting to make sure it's 3.5 2.44mb but when I try to save and it asks me to continue the keyboard stops working. There is a blinking cursor so I don't think it's frozen. Anyways this doesn't help. I can have it continue anyways and it will boot to windows 98 because that's what's loaded on the hard drive, however it either doesn't see a floppy drive, or if it does, it won't read from it. Any help to try to get this working is appreciated. thanks.

Reply 1 of 2, by thenix

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OK updating myself here. The floppy disk controller on the motherboard seems to be messed up. I put in a ISA card that controls that plus serial, scsi, and other ports and it works fine. However there are IRQ conflicts and it wants me to fix it in the bios, however now when I try to go into the bios it just gives me a blank screen and never loads. Anyone see this happen before? Anything I should try to get the bios up?

Reply 2 of 2, by Horun

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thenix wrote on 2020-05-09, 15:36:

OK updating myself here. The floppy disk controller on the motherboard seems to be messed up. I put in a ISA card that controls that plus serial, scsi, and other ports and it works fine. However there are IRQ conflicts and it wants me to fix it in the bios, however now when I try to go into the bios it just gives me a blank screen and never loads. Anyone see this happen before? Anything I should try to get the bios up?

Pull the floppy disk controller back out, go into BIOS and see if you can disable the onboard floppy and onboard serial+parallel ports. Nearly all BIOS have a way to disable those items hopefully your does too. Re-insert floppy disk controller and see if it all works

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

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