VOGONS


First post, by retro games 100

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Introduction
I am testing a super I/O winbond ISA card, model PTI-227B. When I received this card, many of the jumper settings were set to "Disabled", which was a bit odd. Luckily, the manual came with it - see below for the download link. I set the HDD and FDD to "Enabled", and set the other resources to their default settings. It works, but you cannot boot the mobo if you attach a DVD-ROM reader to the IDE cable in slave mode. Pity.

The card
The PTI-227B is the top card.
io.jpg

The card at the bottom is to illustrate a newer card, which does support ATAPI. I have shown the underside of each card in a smaller "inset" picture. This shows the date of manufacture.

Links
1) Link to the instruction manual. Filename is called manual.7z. It's in .7z format, because the .PDF file is 50 meg!
2) Link to PrimoPDF by Nitro PDF, a free to download and use .PDF converter.

Notes
1) I scanned in each page of the instruction manual, and saved each image as a bitmap picture. I then trimmed away any excess white space inside Paint Shop Pro. I then inserted each "trimmed" picture in to a Word document. I then converted this Word document in to a .PDF file for your convenience, as the .PDF format is fairly widespread these days. In order to convert the Microsoft Word document to a .PDF file, I used a free to download and use converter called PrimoPDF, a link to which is provided in link number 2 above.

2) In order to use this software, you select the Print option in your authoring software. So, for Microsoft Word, you select File and then Print. For the printer, you choose PrimoPDF, because it acts like a virtual printer. From there, it's easy - you just click a few buttons and everything is done.

Reply 1 of 2, by Tetrium

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Hey RG100, think that when testing, you could check if these controllers have support for the 2.88MB floppy drive?
Thinking...do these cards actually have a BIOS that you can enter or something??

Oh wait, that's the motherboard BIOS.

Edit:Just ftr, I once tested a couple drives (1.44 ones) and set them to 2.88 in the BIOS. They would still read+write 1.44 disks perfectly fine, but gave an error when I tried to format a 2.88 disk 😜

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 2 of 2, by jdelange

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Thanks for all the hard work. Even in 2025 this is still of value! I recently purchased the upper card shown and installed it in a Dell XPS 450 Pentium 3 in order to add a 5.25 inch floppy as second floppy drive.

Whatever I tried, XP kept saying please insert disk in drive A, even when a diskette was already inserted. I searched the internet and stumbled upon this https://www.tek-tips.com/threads/pc-sees-flop … to-them.954447/ where someone had the exact same problem and tried everything possible to make it work. Yet the thread did not provide a solution.

I decided to ask ChatGPT. TL;DR it's a bios problem in combination with how XP works. It's not solvable. The floppy drive works in DOS and Windows 98 (I have a dual boot) because these access hardware differently.

I found the explanation by ChatGPT illuminating and helpful because it prevented from wasting more time on it.

Here is a https://chatgpt.com/share/68263520-fbdc-8003- … a1-d8eba6bd1340 to the discussion.