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Floppy controller not working in DOS/WinXP but works during boot

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First post, by troydm

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So I finally got myself a Gotek and I'm having a weird problem.
Hardware: MSI MS-7253 with on board FDC controller enabled
I can boot from Floppy img of MS-DOS 6.22 on Gotek, and it works fine, I can even change floppies on Gotek and drive A: is working as expected
BUT
No matter what I do, it doesn't works in WinXP or even MS-DOS 6.22 installed on HDD drive when I boot from HDD
In WinXP I see device Standard Floppy Controller under Floppy Interfaces in device manager but there is no A: drive and no matter what I do with Gotek it doesn't shows up
Same on MS-DOS installed on HDD, I even tried disabling all drivers and booting with empty configure.sys and autoexec.bat, there is no Floppy, interestingly HWInfo shows that DMA2 is used by Floppy Controller but in IRQ assignments IRQ6 is free

Any suggestions?

Reply 1 of 5, by maxtherabbit

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Make sure your CMOS setup is set correctly for the floppy drive type. Windows uses this information to enumerate the floppy drive(s)

Reply 2 of 5, by troydm

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maxtherabbit wrote on 2025-05-03, 14:00:

Make sure your CMOS setup is set correctly for the floppy drive type. Windows uses this information to enumerate the floppy drive(s)

it's set as 1.44mb floppy drive, setting it to 2.88 makes no difference, still not detecting or usable, but when booted from usable as if controller for floppy is not even initialized when booting from hdd

Reply 3 of 5, by Deunan

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Real HDD or CF card? I've seen some CF cards not play nice with floppy controllers. Could also be another card that, for some reason, uses that I/O space. I would suggest to test with bare bones, VGA, HDC+FDC and that's it. No drivers either, including mouse, just to rule out software issues in DOS - but it's probably a HW thing if WinXP also refuses to work.

Reply 4 of 5, by troydm

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Deunan wrote on 2025-05-03, 23:12:

Real HDD or CF card? I've seen some CF cards not play nice with floppy controllers. Could also be another card that, for some reason, uses that I/O space. I would suggest to test with bare bones, VGA, HDC+FDC and that's it. No drivers either, including mouse, just to rule out software issues in DOS - but it's probably a HW thing if WinXP also refuses to work.

Yeah real old ide hdd from wd, dos is installed on it, I am wondering if it is something to do with that particular controller not playing nicely with Gotek, not sure why it's working fine during boot tho, but asking Chatgpt for a list of probable causes I got an answer that some more modern period motherboards that had floppy controller but we're tailored for more modern usage had a Floppy Controller disabled when booting from hdd, not why controller is still visible in Device Manager if it is disabled tho

Reply 5 of 5, by troydm

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After few days of intensive investigations I was able to solve the issue issue thanks to chatgpt, root cause was that I was using grub4dos as bootloader for all my hdd systems, which by default disables floppy drive
https://github.com/chenall/grub4dos/issues/112

so adding this to menu.lst solved the issue
map --floppies=1

gotek drive is perfectly working from both dos and winxp

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