VOGONS


First post, by GabrielKnight123

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I have a motherboard that's not able to copy 1.44mb floppy disk files right, sometimes it will copy a file or two but then throw an error of "sector not found reading drive A, Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?" if I cancel with "F" to stop the retry loop it says "Fail on INT 24 - (file name)". I have tried about 10 working disk drives and used Windows 10 with a USB floppy drive to chkdsk A: /R for bad disks and the disks I'm using all pass as good so no bad clusters. I only have this problem with this board and when I flip the board over someone has soldered a resistor bank to the secondary IDE with a wire that goes to the 5 pin resistor bank above the primary IDE on the top side of the board so could this hack/repair be causing the floppy drives to fail? The motherboard is a "CPI/I-P54SP4 Rev 1.4" I'm using a Pentium-S 90MHz PCPU3V90 CPU and I'm completely able to use the motherboard with a video card, ram and hard drive its just this floppy drive problem that's stopping it from being a full working system. The Bios has the 1.44mb drive enabled as "A".

Reply 1 of 1, by majestyk

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This infamous PCI0640B IDE controller is a bug-ridden POS causing data corruption under certain circumstances.
I guess the addition of the two resistor networks was made (by ASUS or later) to fix any of the bugs.
It´s also known for making trouble when there´s Floppy and IDE IO activity at the same time - which is what´s happening here.
You should avoid using this controller chip anyway. Better disable it in BIOS and use a seperate PCI IDE- or a SCSI-controller instead.

The Floppy-port (as COM ports, LPT etc) is probably connected to the SMC Super-IO.

Have you tried updating / reflashing the BIOS?
Have you tried with a different Floppy cable?