Check BIOS settings for the floppy drive.

I believe it is set correctly. Although the IO controller that I am using has its own BIOS, I have set the mobo's BIOS set up option to "A: = 1.44MB". That should work. If I set it to "A: = None", then I get no activity light on the FDD when I attempt to navigate to the A:\ DOS prompt. I'm worried that the mobo may have a subtle defect.

I'm examining the jumper settings, to see if there is anything wrong, which might make the mobo behave abnormally. There's one thing about it which I have never seen: I haven't seen this type of cache configuration before. There are the usual 8 sockets, for 8 cache chips. 4 of these sockets are occupied with cache chips. They have 512K written on them, and occupy all of the cache socket length area. Is this 256Kb in total? That is what the mobo's cache jumpers are set to. Thanks a lot.

Is the floppy drive actually spinning and at the correct speed? You might have a burned out/gummed up motor or a stretched/broken drive belt.

I've never had a problem with it. If I remove the troublesome Asus mobo, and replace it with anything else, it works fine. The floppy drive is spinning, but I am unable to tell at what speed it is spinning at.

I cannot discount the possibility that the FDD is defective, because it's quite old. It's possible there's a fault with it. But it's very odd that it won't work on the Asus mobo, but it works on every other mobo I have. Unfortunately I don't have another FDD to test. I might buy one, as they are cheap and plentiful on ebay.

If the drive works with other motherboards, and you get the symptoms in every ISA slot, then that leaves only the floppy controller since the drive and the ISA slots seem not to have any problems.

I don't understand. The floppy controller is on the IO card, I presume. The IO card works fine in other mobos. There's no IO chip on the mobo, I think. I mean, there's no integrated IO on the mobo. I wonder if it's got something to do with the mobo's chipset chips?

retro games 100 wrote:

I don't understand. The floppy controller is on the IO card, I presume. The IO card works fine in other mobos. There's no IO chip on the mobo, I think. I mean, there's no integrated IO on the mobo. I wonder if it's got something to do with the mobo's chipset chips?

That's possible, too. There may be some conflict between the motherboard chipset and the floppy controller. You may have to use an IO card with a different floppy controller with that motherboard. You should probably research both the motherboard chipset and the chip on the floppy controller to see if it's a known bug or if anyone else has encountered it before. It could also be a BIOS related bug with that floppy controller. You may need a newer or older version to work with it.

Hmm. I've just tried 2 other IO controllers that I know work well on other mobos. Neither of them work on this Asus board. One was ISA, the other VLB. That's 3 in total now. There's something wrong here. I reckon the mobo is either defective in some way, or there's a jumper set wrongly that is causing the mobo to malfunction.

BTW, the HDD works OK, even the ODD worked when I tested it on one of the ISA IO cards that supports ATAPI. And the COM port worked, because I got a serial mouse working. This problem appears to be specific to the FDD. I have found a replacement FDD. I'll test it ASAP...

Edit: I just tried another working FDD, and I still get the same problem.

Have you done a search here on VOGONS to see if anyone else is using that motherboard? Maybe they can tell you what IO cards they are using with it and what the jumper settings should be.

I once had a similar problem with a board. I can't remember which one it was at the moment... It was really strange.It turned out there was some kind of conflict with the cache memory. Whenever I turned it off, the floppy would work fine. I replaced the cache chips, and then had no problem at all.

Very interesting. Inside the BIOS set up area, I set the L2 cache option to "Disabled". Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem. I tried to format a diskette. It actually started to format a diskette. However, at 99% it reported an error saying that it couldn't write the directory.

I wonder if I should go ahead and remove the cache chips on the board, and replace them? I think I might do that, because I've go nothing to lose. I'll have to find some first...

retro games 100 wrote:

Very interesting. Inside the BIOS set up area, I set the L2 cache option to "Disabled". Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem. I tried to format a diskette. It actually started to format a diskette. However, at 99% it reported an error saying that it couldn't write the directory.

I wonder if I should go ahead and remove the cache chips on the board, and replace them? I think I might do that, because I've go nothing to lose. I'll have to find some first...

Really odd...I suppose you already tried a different ISA slot, right?

Re: ISA slots - I've tried all of them.

speaking of cache weirdness... on my shuttle hot-569 board, if I enabled "system bios cacheable" when using a K6-III CPU, the system will lock up right before it starts the OS... at where it says "updating DMI table" or whatever (basically after the screen where you see all the system devices and IRQ assignments in the Award boot screen)