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A tale of two Floppy controllers (Vendex Turbo-999-XT)

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First post, by twilliamc

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So I have my Vendex Turbo-888-XT with battery corrosion all cleaned up and traces good (that I am aware of). However I ran into an issue where the floppy drive head will not move when the system tries to read a disk. The light turns on, diskette spins, but no head movement and only a disk bad error on the screen after a few seconds.

Thinking the controller might have failed, I ordered and installed a IBM floppy controller as a replacement for the on-board controller. I flipped what dip switches (on the motherboard and processor card) I believe are the proper ones to reflect no floppy disk drives installed. After installing the IBM floppy controller and confirming the drive is jumpered and terminated properly, I still get the same result. Memory test passes, disk drive lights up and spins, and finally a disk bad error.

I confirmed the drive and disk work on my 486, but now I am at a loss. Any thoughts?

Unnamed: 486DX4 @ 120MHz, 16MB, 2GB, 2MB VGA, SBPro 2.0, DOS/W3.11, W95
PC-65:P3 @ 800MHz x2, 512MB, 128GB SSD, Voodoo3, SB Live!, Win98SE

Reply 1 of 2, by retardware

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Did you try using an AT floppy cable on an XT? This won't work.

Edit:
You can use the non-cable-flipped connector of an AT cable on XT, but you need to set unusual switch/jumper config.
Well, actually you need to then set them as they were intended to be set on a 4-drive config, as IBM's idea of the cable flip broke the ability to support 4 drives.
If you use a normal (non-flipped) cable, you can actually use 4 drives on PC.

Reply 2 of 2, by twilliamc

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The computer came from the seller with a short non-flipped cable. I used that with the onboard FDC thinking it came stock with the system. On the IBM FDC card, I followed minuszerodegree's guide to set it for 1 floppy disk only (terminated and jumpered to 2).

Unnamed: 486DX4 @ 120MHz, 16MB, 2GB, 2MB VGA, SBPro 2.0, DOS/W3.11, W95
PC-65:P3 @ 800MHz x2, 512MB, 128GB SSD, Voodoo3, SB Live!, Win98SE

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