Have you tried making A be the 3 1/2" and B be the 5 1/4"?

Will it work if you remove the CF card?
(Again CF cards and floppy interfaces may have issues)

Yeah, I have swapped them around B and A and no difference...

As for the CF Card, I havent tested without it as I am trying to keep it as I'd really like to use it as the HDD...hoping something else could be causing my issue. Can give it a test though...

I swapped out the VLB Controllers for an ISA controller and the system saw the HDD and the Floppy Drives and I was able to get DOS installed and the system on its way....

Wanted to say thanks for the help on this...

Still curious why none of my 5 VLB Controllers worked with either the CF Card or Standard HDD?

Usually it's possible to disable specific ports on controller cards via the jumpers on the card. Are you sure the floppy port was enabled on the one you used?

Yeah, I am sure it was enabled on all of them. I went over the jumpers on all 5 and ensured it was on..

When I changed the BIOS to check for Floppies on boot, both floppy drives spin up, then it finds the hard drive, then when it should start running the boot disk, you hear the floppy drive run for about 10 seconds with no drive activity and then stops.

Good thing you got it working.

But it got me thinking, this does not sound like the standard CF card causing floppy disk change issues, as I realized you use two drives, one being 5 1/2" drive.

Back in the day, 5 1/2" drives had stronger termination resistors (maybe 1 kohm), so it required pretty strong logic chip to drive it. More modern drives and 3 1/4" drives had weaker termination resistors (maybe 4.7 kohm), so even if you have two newer drives, it is still a weaker load than one older drive. I've heard some modern floppy controller cards can't drive so strong loads as they have weaker logic drivers.

So can you check if you can access the single 3 1/4" drive OK, and then single 5 1/2" drive OK, and maybe two 3 1/4" drives just in case, to find out how much load you can put on the floppy adapter. Also, it could just be that one of your floppy drives or cable is broken.

I can check on that, but I am using the same floppy cable now I was on the ones that were failing. Same Floppy drives to...but I am changing the 3 1/2" anyway as the one I was working with doesnt have that smooth click sound when a disk is inserted into the drive that I like to hear.....

But I havent hooked up both at the same time yet as I was happy to get it working and get DOS installed for now last night...

I really wanted to use that CF Card, but with only one IDE connection on the ISA Cards I have and the CF Adapter being female, I am f'd

The other thing that irks me is that I want the 3 1/2 to be the A Drive but the way the motherboard and case is laid out, the only way to get both floppy drives hooked up is make 5 1/4" the A Drive as its a Desktop box (going for 486 look) and the drives are side by side.

Some BIOS's had swap A and B drives (or something along those lines) Otherwise you may be able to find a cable with both connectors in both positions.
I had one that came with my 486 which irked me as it never had 5 1/4 drive and the cable was long and cumbersome, cant please everyone can you!)

Jepael wrote on 2016-11-22, 19:29:

Will it work if you remove the CF card?
(Again CF cards and floppy interfaces may have issues)

I have this issue. If I remove CF adapter floopy boots fine. but not when cf adapter is attached. any solution for that?