So I am facing a difficult challenge...I have an old Goupil G5 80286, which is an atypical French computer manufactured in the 90's. It comes with a HDD and a 5.25 floppy drive. The BIOS is very basic and specific with very few settings to play with. Mainly:
- Floppy A, FloppyB: each can be set to None, 360Ko, 720Ko, 1.2Mo, 1.4Mo
- Disk 1, Disk2: for each there are 40 possible HDD geometries to choose from
I reinstalled DOS 5.0 on the HDD by connecting to another PC. The setting for Disk1 is #5 for this HDD's geometry
The computer boots fine. But it's just impossible to make any floppy drive detected...the motherboard has a FD connector 34 pin. I tested several cables, several FDD models (5.25 and 3.5), went through all possible jumper settings on the original 5.25 FDD. Nothing
The battery was dead, so I replaced it. BIOS remembers the #5 setting for Disk1 but...Floppy A and Floppy B always reset to 'None' even after selecting 360Ko or 1.4 Mo and saving the BIOS parameters. So the FDD is not detected, computer boots on C: and when I reboot and enter BIOS, all floppies are back to "None".... I am wondering why the new battery would enable to save the Disk BIOS setting but not the floppy one!
Other questions: could it be that the Motherboard FDD controler is dead while the computer boots properly and I don't get any error message? Or do I need to add commands to config.sys to ensure the floppy is detected (I was assuming the BIOS detection process would be sufficient). Thanks