jumpers on the floppy drive, or straight cable? 'normally' floppy cable has few wires twisted between drive B and drive A connector, with drive A connector and controller connector being on the ends of the cable.

weedeewee wrote on 2021-03-11, 22:15:

jumpers on the floppy drive, or straight cable? 'normally' floppy cable has few wires twisted between drive B and drive A connector, with drive A connector and controller connector being on the ends of the cable.

The cable i'm using is for one drive only, so it only has controller-drive connectors. It doesn't appear to be twisted at any end. Do floppy drives have jumpers? I guess I should check that out.

Need the make and model of the floppy drive. Most older ones have jumpers, most newer 3.5" do not and need a twisted cable to drive (except for a few rare boards like Compaqs, etc).

I'm thinking it has to be the mobo that is causing this issue. I dug out a second floppy drive and a two-drive cable and I still get the same thing with both the drives. If I remove the A drive assignment from the bios it works, otherwise just floppy drive fail error 40. The lights on the floppy's turn on and they make a sound at bootup (just as you'd expect). Since it's working with only the B drive assigned I guess there is not any problem with the cable or controller card. Digging through the mobo manual to see if there is some kind of jumper that could be doing this. The mobo doesn't seem to have a onboard floppy controller (which I found weird and is the reason I bought a ISA controller card for that purpose). It has a onboard IDE controller though.

Horun wrote on 2021-03-11, 23:26:

Need the make and model of the floppy drive. Most older ones have jumpers, most newer 3.5" do not and need a twisted cable to drive (except for a few rare boards like Compaqs, etc).

I'm guessing they are newer ones. They don't seem to have any visible jumpers. The first one is a samsung SFD-321B and the other one is a compaq floppy drive 161697-FB0.

maybe your controller card has a failed circuit for the 'first' drive.

You could try the controller card in another machine with two floppydrives connected,setup in bios and test them both ?

Without the twist in the cable, it is always going to only work as drive B unless the drive itself has special jumpers to configure it to work as A on a straight cable.

http://www.nullmodem.com/Floppy.htm

One option would be to create the proper twist in the cable with your current cable so it will work as the A drive.