Hi all,

I recently perchased an assembled Micro 8088, CF-lite and 7 slot 8 bit ISA backplane, all to Sergei's design.

Ive added to this a standard Trident video card (16 bit card, but jumperable for an 8 bit slot), and a standard IDE I/O card, with the IDE part disabled.

I've set the Micro 8088 with the correct jumpers / switches (and F1 setup) for this setup, including setting the first floppy to 1.44MB 3.5.
Speed is set to 9.5MHz, as I have a V20 in there, but have also tried at 4.77MHz.

I am booting from a CF card with PC-DOS 7.0 on it.

This mostly works apart from the Floppy drive, which seems very hit and miss, for example I can boot to dos and enter :

FORMAT A: /U/S/F:720

The drive will fire up, and step through formatting each track, seek back to track 0 at the end of the format step a couple of times and then come back with a write error.
The floppy will then not respond correctly until I have hard power cycled the system.

Sometimes the drive won't respond at all and just comes back with general failure.

What I've tried to resolve this :
Checked and refreshed some of the soldering on the Micro 8088 & CF cards.
Checked the chips on the Micro 8088, CF board and backplane in my BackBit Pro, all test good.
Tried different Floppy drives.
Tried different floppy disks (incase of bad media).
Tried different floppy cables.
Tried different PSU, was origionally using a PicoATX, now using a propper 200W ATX PSU.
Swapped the CF lite for a full XT-IDE implementation with a CF adapter, tried several different CF cards incase that is the problem.
Tried several IDE IO cards.

I ran checkit pro on the system, that seemed to indicate faulty DMA / Interrupt controllers, but have read that this could be because the
Faraday FE2010A only implements what is used of the DMA/Interrupt controllers, so may fail these tests.

Does anyone have any clue what the ****** is going on here as I'm tearing my hair out trying to get this to work.

Cheers.

Phill.