First post, by NHVintage
Hi - I have an Epson Equity 1+ that I recently received - amazingly, its old hard drive still works, and boots to DOS (epson's variation). However, I cannot get ANY floppy drive to work on it. I've tried the original 5 1/4 inch disk drive, several 3 1/2 inch disk drives, including an Epson one from ebay (granted that could be broken but its behavior is the same) and also moved to an IBM ISA floppy controller card with the floppy hooked to it rather than the controlller built into the motherboard, on the chance the mobo controller is bad. I've tried it with the floppy disk controller jumper set to off while using the IBM controller, that got rid of the 601 floppy error on boot, and the drives appear to behave like they should , except every disk gives a variety of errors. usually a bad sector 0 or 'drive isn't ready', but not always. I have tried formatting the floppys on the Epson to overcome that issue, but that fails too. I even tried a Gotek floppy emulator, that gives the same 'drive not ready/unreadable' variety of errors, and when I try formatting one of the virtual disks on the USB, it gives me a 'write protection violation' error. Im about to chuck the computer because if I can't get software on it somehow, the things useless. Any suggestions what to look at or what might be wrong? EDIT: I forgot to note I tried a half dozen different floppy drive cables too. I have a USB 3.5 inch floppy drive that I have copied images onto disks with using my modern pc, and formatted them, and that works fine.