You can try to add an additional IDE controller in Win95 hardware setup. Maybe you have to specify the secondary I/O and interrupts.

How would I know which are the right ones?

The secondary (choose the same as the primary) is usually on IRQ15 / base 170h.

Thanks! I got it working!

I'm having a similar problem with a 3.5" floppy drive now. The BIOS detects it and everything and it goes through the boot process but when I put a boot disk in to boot from it gives this error message:

Disk I/O error
Replace the disk, and press any key

It's not a bad disk as I've used it many times just yesterday on another floppy drive. I've always had problems with this drive. I thoguht it was dead for the longest time until I just tried it now and it worked but it still gives this message. Anything I can do?

probably still dead 😀
floppy drives die easely

Qbix wrote:

probably still dead 😀

Most likely. Floppies and FDDs are very unreliable PC components. The heads tend to get misaligned after some use. Often disks can still be read in the same drive they were written in, but not in other drives. Some drives produce different results at different temperatures (one of mine would never work just after bootup 😒). Meanwhile I've gotten so fed up with FDDs, I threw them all out.

Well, some months ago I managed to ruin two floppy drives in two weeks just while attempting to back up all my floppies (I wanted to burn the content on CD). After a few dozen floppies and two dead floppy drives I stopped doing it...

I have a working floppy drive now, but use it as little as possible (well, my girlfriend uses it - I tried to persuade her to use USB Flashdisc but failed miserably - she likes floppies and she cannot imagine to work without them 😀 ).

Mirek

5u3 wrote:

The heads tend to get misaligned after some use. Often disks can still be read in the same drive they were written in, but not in other drives.

Floppies also could write bits of a byte in a reverse order. Happened a few times and disks were unreadable by other drives until I discovered the reason: FDD cables, at least older ones, have exactly 8 wires reversely connected for one of the connectors, and if fdd is plugge into a wrong one, it is incompatible.

Got rid of that legacy (it passed out) few years ago, and never looked back. Though you still can't install Windows XP on a SATA disk without floppy containing a SATA driver:)

Yep, I haven't used floppies for years except for flashing motherboard BIOSes and installing SATA drivers. I tried building my new computer without a floppy drive, but realized that I needed one to install WinXP on a SATA disk. I plan to keep one floppy drive around and move it from computer to computer as needed (which shouldn't be too often).