Remove the external battery pack and look if it still happens.
Did you reset the Bios by a jumper or different.
If by jumper check if the jumper is seated well and that the inner metal piece is connected ok.

For the rest I can't imagine what would cause this.. perhaps you slightly hit some chip while working on it and is one of the feet that attach to the board bent/damaged?

So far I've reset the BIOS multiple times, pulled the battery multiple times, and checked everything over until I was blue in the face but, still nothing.

So, I decided I'd go ahead and build the AM386DX-40 system I had lying around for some time only to have the same errors appear there. All subsequent tries yielded the same errors. As of right now I'm extremely confused. I'm NOT familiar with XT/AT systems (I grew up with all Pentium era gear), and as a result do not really know much outside of the absolute basics regarding their particulars.

As of right now, all my controller cards are 'failing' in both my 386 and 486 machines. I don't know why, and it makes no sense. The systems boot, check RAM fine, the HDD spins up, it's heads self-test, and then the computer just hangs and proceeds to spit out "HDD Controler Failure" and "Floppy Controller Failure" regardless of what I do. I'm not sure if it has something to do with the BIOS but, I have no other controller cards to test at this point. I only have two as of right now, one Acer UN-1051, and an IDEPLUS-V4. Changing ISA slots or swapping video cards and RAM has not made a difference either.

Any more thoughts? This is really confusing and I'd like to get these systems up and running. They're the only two white box systems I have (well, the 386 is a Contaq-built generic tower), and I'd really like to get them up and running.

That is weird. Dit you try different cables and drives?

Cyrix200+ wrote:

That is weird. Dit you try different cables and drives?

And to be more specific, is the HDD or FDD cable accidentally upside down? So pin 1 is the red wire and it connects to pin 1 on both HDD and controller card?

You need to find the pin 1 which is marked on the controller and always the red wire indicates the pin 1 in most of the IDE and Floppy cables and the pin 1 on floppy drives is located on the most left pins on the drive and on the HDD is located on the left side of the Molex connector, hope this helps you, sometimes this can be a pain to identify which is the correct pin 1 spot, happened to me on boards with integrated controller

I've tried flipping the cables around multiple times on both ends with no luck so far. I know that if I have them flipped the wrong way the HDD will NOT spin up at all, and the HDD & floppy will illuminate their lights constantly to signify an error.

Cables and drives can also have the rows inverted so pin 1 is where pin 2 should be and so on... its really hard to figure out as the floppy led isnt constantly on as with a flipped cable.

I have both such cables and drives.

I have tried all of my floppy drives and HDD's (about 7-10 of each), all pins are visibly marked on both the components and I/O boards themselves. I know all the drives work as I've tested and run them on multiple systems to confirm functionality. I've run out of IDE and floppy cables to test at this point (about 30 of them), and am still scratching my head as to what could be the issue. Could there be some sort of BIOS conflict or issue preventing the controller card from operating properly?

I'm going to try piggybacking the I/O controllers onto one of my other systems to see if I can find out whether the cards are dead. Is there supposed to be some sort of I/O controller BIOS screen or something as well? All I get before the MOBO screen is the typical VGA bios screen and that's it.

I've seen something very similar to this last night - I had problems with one controller working, then my other controller didn't work either. In the end I had accidentally only put the IDE cable on one set of the connector pins, although I'm not convinced there isn't another problem.

I'm also having issues with read errors on my floppy drive - which is impossible, because it's a floppy emulator reading off an SD card! I've tried swapping cables and SD cards.

My worry is that perhaps the motherboard is on the way out.