XP is known to be buggy with 3.5" so I can only imagine that bugginess extends to 5.25" in which I've never heard of anyone using the two in conjunction 😉 Are you sure the bios knows how to write to them?

98 build - again I'd ask about the bios.

HP vectra... Well with that I've no idea. Are you sure the disk is good and not trying to boot from a disk with bad sectors? Can you get Linux on any of those machines? It has a wonderful function called "badblocks" which allows you to see just how good a disk is. It also occasionally brings disks back to life with a destructive read-write test (obviously losing any data on the disk so back that up first).

The BIOS doesn't support more than one FDD on the XP and 98 builds, so I had to use the 5.25 as the A drive. I've never heard of XP being buggy with 3.5'' (even Windows 10 works fine with them for me). The BIOS on the XP and 98 builds allows me to select 1.2 MB 5.25'' and 360 KB 5.25'' as the FDD type, so I would assume it has write support. As mentioned in my original post, the disk works perfectly in my 5160, so I do not believe there is a problem with the disk.

I could try running a Linux distro on one of these machines. I have a bunch of old Linux Mint CD's (EDIT- DVD's), though I'm not sure how well they would run on the older hardware.

EDIT: I just tried booting Linux Mint on the 98 machine, but I'm guessing the BIOS doesn't support booting from DVD (I do have a DVD drive in it). It just hangs on POST when checking the optical drive when the disc is in the tray.

EDIT 2: It is definitely something wrong with the drive, as I tried plugging the FDD from my 5160 into my 98, and it's able to not only boot from my DOS 3.0 disk, but is also able to successfully complete a formatting (though, apparently there were roughly 15 KB of bad sectors on the disk I tested). When trying to write a disk image through Winimage, I get an illegal operation warning, but normal file transfer seems to work just fine (all the same if anyone has any suggestions on how to get Winimage to work correctly, this would still be appreciated, as well as any suggestions on how to repair the floppy drives). The 5160 FDD does differ in that it's a 360K drive instead of 1.2M.

Most 1.2MB disk drives can't write to 360KB disks. Can you read from the 5160 the files you put with the 1.2MB drive ?

Also, cleaning the heads might help.

I have a dual boot Windows ME/XP machine with a DD 5.25" drive as B:

It works fine in ME but causes errors in XP.

Deksor wrote:

Most 1.2MB disk drives can't write to 360KB disks. Can you read from the 5160 the files you put with the 1.2MB drive ?

Also, cleaning the heads might help.

Ooookay. I did not know that. That would explain why even when I was able to get the XP computer to write files to the disk I got errors when I tried to access the files on my 5160. I just assumed the higher-capacity drive would be able to read/write to lower capacity disks like (I think?) 3.5'' drives are, and of course more modern types of drives, like DVD burners being able to write to CD's. Still doesn't explain why I wasn't having read problems before. I'm assuming they typically don't have a problem reading 360K disks? And do you happen to know if you can use a Kryoflux with a 1.2 MB drive to write 360K floppy images? Either way, I'm going to get a 360K drive to make things simpler for writing disks for my 5160.

Thanks for the help!

The problem with 360k disks on a 1.2MB drive, is that it writes half the track width - if you start with a clean erased disk and write 360k only using the 1.2MB drive, then they may read ok in a 360k drive.

Anything written to the disk by a 360k drive cannot be properly rewritten by a 1.2MB, if you don't have a suitable demagnetizer, it may be possible to wipe a disk in the 1.2MB by formatting as 1.2MB and then reformatting as 360k, with the half tracks remaining at HD format (usually takes up to about 2/3) being just a blur to the 360k drive.

ocdmonkey wrote:

My XP build[..] My 98 build[..]My HP Vectra][..]
So, basically, any ideas on what might be going wrong?

I'm curious.. May I ask if you did try using the 5.25" floppy drive in something period-correct, too ?
Something ISA-only, with a dedicated floppy controller on an expansion card ?
- In the past I solved issues with a 5.25" drive in my Pentium PC by connecting it to a floppy card for the ISA slot.
I'm still not sure what it was that made the on-board controller incompatible. Signaling differences, perhaps (5v vs 3.3v) ?

Just a quick update, I hope you don't mind.
I've just found an utility that was made to assist writing 5.25" 360K disks in 1.2MB floppy drives.
It also comes with an utility to read/write 360k floppy images..