I changed some molex plugs around, and I am now able to read 3.5 disks and 5.25 disks in Windows. I can format the 5.25 floppies I bought off of ebay. I bought 50 5.25 floppies, and so far so good. I don't have many 3,5 floppies to test (lost them in a move) and while I can open and read my Voyetra Multimedia Essentials Pack disk, I am getting errors when trying to install it, copy the contents to a folder on my C drive, and scandisk has so far told me that a couple of clusters are screwed, though it is probably due to the age of the disk (which sucks, because I haven't been able to find replacement Voyetra floppies or CDs.)

So it looks like there may have been a power issue that was solved by rerouting molex plugs (everything worked/lit up, though I have a lot of devices/cards including a Voodoo 5, Live! Drive, the CF IDE adapter, both floppy drives, and two optical drives.) It remains to be seen, as these issues seem to be random.

Glad you got it working ! Sometimes a loose power connection is all it takes. I have seen the 4 pin Molex get loose where the cable end female parts gets widened making bad connection, usually you can use very small needle nose pliers and gently "pinch" them back to a tight fit. Just be sure to not over pinch or else will never get the male part to slide in (damn almost sounds like p0rn) 🤣

Horun wrote on 2021-05-07, 23:23:

Glad you got it working ! Sometimes a loose power connection is all it takes. I have seen the 4 pin Molex get loose where the cable end female parts gets widened making bad connection, usually you can use very small needle nose pliers and gently "pinch" them back to a tight fit. Just be sure to not over pinch or else will never get the male part to slide in (damn almost sounds like p0rn) 🤣

Thank you. One of the wires had to be put back in the plug, though I don't know if that happened when I disconnected things, and it was the wire going to the CF adapter. I think it may be prudent for me to buy a couple more floppy drives in each format, before they become too expensive. I am formatting these 50 5.25 floppies, and I am getting random errors stating that there isn't a disk in the drive or that the drive door is open, and I have to pop the lever a few times before "it takes." I have a feeling that the mechanism that detects that a disk is in the drive is failing.

I bought a Procom PFX1200 and had posted about needing a controller card for it. I decided to open it up and it is a standard drive inside of a housing with an interface card, and I tested it as working as an internal drive. I will be putting together a 486, so I will definitely need another working 5.25 drive!

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-05-07, 23:51:

I am formatting these 50 5.25 floppies, and I am getting random errors stating that there isn't a disk in the drive or that the drive door is open, and I have to pop the lever a few times before "it takes." I have a feeling that the mechanism that detects that a disk is in the drive is failing.

Sounds like it could be dirty switch contacts, I had a 3.5" drive that had a problem with those. I tried just squirting some IPA in the switch but that didn't help, so ended up having the take the switch apart to clean it up properly. If you do have a go at cleaning the switch then whilst you've got the drive out, it's probably also worth cleaning the read heads. I've used IMD (http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/index.htm) for doing a rough alignment and rpm test, which can help check some basic functionality. I also had a failing drive that could mostly copy things in Win98, but would give a lot of errors in DOS. I suspect that Win98 does more retries without asking. It's also worth inspecting the drives for any leaky capacitors as that seems to be what caused other things to fail on my drive.