DVINTHEHOUSEMAN wrote on 2021-08-02, 06:48:

As of now the controller rarely works, once in a blue moon the drive makes the sound of (what i can only assume is) loading the heads onto the platters of the disk or the floppy drive heads bang against the end like you would hear on an Apple II, instead of doing the regular ee-ee-er sound you would expect to hear.

The ee-ee-er sound is the (patented!) method invented by IBM to automatically tell 40-track and 80-track floppy drives apart. If you get some other sound instead of this sound, it is extremely likely not from the hard drive, but from the floppy drive(s). As you have two drives, each drive should make this sound. You hear none, so the problem is rooted either in your A: drive or it is a general problem.

Your comparison to the Apple II might be a very good one: The Apple II makes this sound, because it has no way of knowing whether the heads are already at the end or not, so it just tries to move the head outwards even if they are already there. In contrast to the Apple II (with heavily cost-optimized drives), PC drives have a "proper" track-0 sensor that tells the controller chip that the head is at track 0. The floppy controller prevents further seek pulses, so a properly working drive with a properly working controller should never bang the head agains the track-0 end of the drive. On the other hand, there is no provision to inhibit the head banging against the end past track 40 or 80, except for software never issuing the command to do so.

I guess your problem is an interface problem beteween the floppy controller chip and the floppy drive. There are two signals that may cause the behaviour you describe if the fail to work properly. The first, most obvious one is the "TRK 00" signal that tells the floppy controller that track 0 has been reached. If this signal is not arriving at the controller when the drive asserts it, you basically degraded your system to Apple II standards, and the controller issuing lots of "seek outwards" pulses in a futile attempt to see the "TRK 00" signal bangs the head agains the outer end. The second broken signal might be the "DIR" signal that sets the seek direction. Assuming the drive interprets every seek pulse as "seek inwards", it will eventually bang against the inner end of the head space, while the controller tries to reach the outer end.

My recommendations:

1. Re-seat the floppy interface cable to exclude contact problems due to loosened connectors or corrosion.
2. Try a different floppy controller card. For this test, even a bog standard AT I/O card with IDE will do. No need to get the hard drive connected until you get the ee-ee-er sound back that you are missing. Hard drives are initialized after the floppy drive.
3. Try with only one of the drives connected as A:, because the other drive might have a fault that disturbs the signals on the interface cable.
4. Make sure all drives are jumpered/DIP-switched (if there are switched/jumpers) to be the second drive. Depending on manufacturer, this is called "DS1" (if they start counting at 0) or "DS2" (if they start counting at 1). In PC systems, the twist in the cable re-routes the A: access signals from the controller to the B: access signals on the drive. This makes a drive after the twist to behave as A: drive, even though it is configured as B: drive.