Are you sure the floppies are in good condition and working on some other computer?

I have a similar issue with my BX-2000 board, I've tried multiple drives and ribbon cables, and multiple diskettes, it has issues reading disks. The said drives, cables and disks work in other systems. Is it possible for the FDD controller on a board to go bad like this?

kixs wrote:

Are you sure the floppies are in good condition and working on some other computer?

Yes, disks are working fine on my other old PCs

appiah4 wrote:

I have a similar issue with my BX-2000 board, I've tried multiple drives and ribbon cables, and multiple diskettes, it has issues reading disks. The said drives, cables and disks work in other systems. Is it possible for the FDD controller on a board to go bad like this?

It could be, I have a similar issue with my 486, but that could be just the IO card i'm using. Instead of giving a not ready error, it says "General failure reading drive A".
I literally can't understand what's going on with these 2 machines, yesterday they were totally fine, now not so much

I had a similar problem. Everything worked fine except floppy drive and still it was changing the PSU that fixed the floppy drive problem.

Alright then, I think sometime I will get some ATX PSUs and converters from Aliexpress.

Baoran wrote:

I had a similar problem. Everything worked fine except floppy drive and still it was changing the PSU that fixed the floppy drive problem.

Now I remember a similar case I had where moving the floppy and HDD to different 12V rails fixed it.. somerhing to try tonight!

unfortunately only one mini MOLEX connector and no adaptors for FDD power D:

I'll be trying the floppy and hard drive on different rails, followed by a different, known working, quality PSU from an HP case if that should fail. I will post the outcome tomorrow.

EDIT: Replaced the floppy, ribbon cable, PSU, and the behaviour did not change. No idea what is wrong, it's probably the motherboard 🙁 Maybe I should just replace it with the BX2000+ I have lying about. Or try a third floppy drive?

Could we both be dealing with (in my case multiple) floppy disks with misaligned heads due to being knocked around etc? I will try tonight to see if my drive works in DOS and/or can read disks it formats itself.

appiah4 wrote:

I have a similar issue with my BX-2000 board, I've tried multiple drives and ribbon cables, and multiple diskettes, it has issues reading disks. The said drives, cables and disks work in other systems. Is it possible for the FDD controller on a board to go bad like this?

Years ago (2010?) I throw a BX-2000(+?) to the garbage bin just because of same exact issue (PII/PIII boards was a cent a dozen at that times 😊). In addition to that, I still have a Gigabyte s370 board with the exact same issue. Everything works but the floppies. So, yes, it happens. 😠

tayyare wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

I have a similar issue with my BX-2000 board, I've tried multiple drives and ribbon cables, and multiple diskettes, it has issues reading disks. The said drives, cables and disks work in other systems. Is it possible for the FDD controller on a board to go bad like this?

Years ago (2010?) I throw a BX-2000(+?) to the garbage bin just because of same exact issue (PII/PIII boards was a cent a dozen at that times 😊). In addition to that, I still have a Gigabyte s370 board with the exact same issue. Everything works but the floppies. So, yes, it happens. 😠

Right.. I opened up and cleaned one of the floppies thoroughly including the magnetic heads, and will try it back on the system tonight. I'll try it under DOS, then I'll try formatting and read/writing a self formatted disk to eliminate other issues. I will finally hook up a GOTEK/HxC to the system to see if it can actually read fine from a disk image through an emulator. I should be able to pinpoint the exact issue that way. If it is a board thing, I can throw this away and try the BX-2000+. If that fails, I still have a GA-6BXC to finally fall back to..

It sounds like the common dead RTC battery issue and the cmos doesn't keep the floppy drive settings anymore,
add this at the beginning of your config.sys:
DRIVPARM=/D:0 /F:7

Read here for another person with the same problem/same solution:
1.44 floppy problem in DOS 6.22

lolo799 wrote:

It sounds like the common dead RTC battery issue and the cmos doesn't keep the floppy drive settings anymore, add this at the b […]
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It sounds like the common dead RTC battery issue and the cmos doesn't keep the floppy drive settings anymore,
add this at the beginning of your config.sys:
DRIVPARM=/D:0 /F:7

Read here for another person with the same problem/same solution:
1.44 floppy problem in DOS 6.22

It was definitely not a dead CMOS battery thing. These boards I was talking about were slot 1 / socket 370 boards, thus with CR2032 batteries, which I change with a new one as soon as I start working with a board, as a principle. Haven't thought the DRIVPARM though, might have been worked.

appiah4 wrote:

tayyare wrote:

Years ago (2010?) I throw a BX-2000(+?) to the garbage bin just because of same exact issue (PII/PIII boards was a cent a dozen at that times 😊). In addition to that, I still have a Gigabyte s370 board with the exact same issue. Everything works but the floppies. So, yes, it happens. 😠

Right.. I opened up and cleaned one of the floppies thoroughly including the magnetic heads, and will try it back on the system tonight. I'll try it under DOS, then I'll try formatting and read/writing a self formatted disk to eliminate other issues. I will finally hook up a GOTEK/HxC to the system to see if it can actually read fine from a disk image through an emulator. I should be able to pinpoint the exact issue that way. If it is a board thing, I can throw this away and try the BX-2000+. If that fails, I still have a GA-6BXC to finally fall back to..

In my situation I tried almost all of the above. Trying in DOS, cleaning the drive, etc. Except Gotek. In my case, the problem was "drive not ready" thing so self formatting was not an option (the floppies, cables and drives that I tried was working just fine with other systems, though).

you turn my floppy disk into a hard drive

Kinky^^

One of my 286 boards wouldn't keep the settings regarding floppy because of the dead Dallas chip, maybe that could be your problem too...

Just reporting that I fixed my issue. It was the floppy disks all along.

I had a bunch of (about two dozens) of Memorex branded 3.5" floppy disks I had bought second hand, they had a Win95 installation backup of some kind on them. I have successfully used them in other systems and with a USB floppy drive I have connected to my main desktop. However, with this PC, these floppies just don't work. Why, I do not know? I tried a Sony branded, much less beat up floppy and everything read and wrote perfectly fine.

I dumped the Memorex floppies. I have quite a score of spare floppies anyway, and I'm considering investing in a couple more gotek units soon, so it's no big issue. This was a genuinely weird turn of events regardless.

How can one system, with the same floppy drive, read an old floppy, but another system with the same drive can't? Floppy controller / floppy disk compatibility is something I never heard of before 😒