DOSdm wrote on Yesterday, 18:14:

I recently had a lot of trouble with my floppy drive on my 486, only to discover that the cable was indeed flipped somehow even though I don't remember doing that. While I can now use the floppy drive, it only works in Win95. I was able to view the contents of a bootdisk I made, but when I tried running the installer on my TIE Fighter floppy it seems to get stuck reading the drive forever. It will not work at all in DOS, doesn't even light up until I am in Windows and access a file on the disk. These floppy disks also worked fine before.

I called the guy that set it up and sold it to me and he suggested cleaning the floppy drive heads, but I was wondering what you all think.

1. What was it doing pre cable flip? Light on all the time?
2. Is the drive configured in BIOS?
3. Does it seek on a cold POST?
4. If you try to switch to the floppy in DOS what is the exact message?

1. It worked fine. I believe I may have knocked the cable loose when I was inside and plugged it in without thinking about its orientation, but it worked completely fine before that.
2. Yes BIOS is configured for a 1.44Mb, 3.5 in drive.
3. No, it does not seek at all during cold boot.
4. "Not ready reading drive A. Abort, retry, fail?"

DOSdm wrote on Today, 03:06:

1. It worked fine. I believe I may have knocked the cable loose when I was inside and plugged it in without thinking about its o […]
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1. It worked fine. I believe I may have knocked the cable loose when I was inside and plugged it in without thinking about its orientation, but it worked completely fine before that.
2. Yes BIOS is configured for a 1.44Mb, 3.5 in drive.
3. No, it does not seek at all during cold boot.
4. "Not ready reading drive A. Abort, retry, fail?"

That message means DOS has A registered as a valid driver letter. So that's good. Is the drive light on all the time right now?

No, after I realized the cable was flipped I made sure I aligned the pins correctly and the light doesn't stay on anymore. But the light also doesn't flicker when I boot like it's supposed to. If I put a floppy disk in the light turns on and stays solid, but only in Windows. In DOS it doesn't do anything at all.

Windows accesses the diskette drive via its own 32 bit drivers. DOS leans far more into how the BIOS is configured. Are you sure it's configured as 1.44MB 3.5" and not 1.2MB or something like that? You can force this setting by adding this line in config.sys:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\DRIVER.SYS /D:0 /F:7

Another thing worth trying: you've been playing around with CD-ROM drivers for DOS. Some of those can result in conflicts with the diskette drive. Try booting in Safe mode command prompt only and see if diskette drive works now without a loaded CD ROM drive.

So.. it works wthin W95 GUI, but not after you "Restart in DOS mode" (which would switch to BIOS drivers) - what about going to a DOS command prompt within Win95 (which would keep with Winblows internal drivers)?

As this happened when you "knocked" the cable off, the cable is most likely the culprit.

When it was reversed, you should have seen that right away - the drive light would have been always ON.

Winblows uses it's own drivers and might be finding the drive at a different select than A:

Make sure:

- The cable is installed correctly. "twist" should be at the floppy end (not mainboard) and closest to Pin1 on the drive (twist is offset and closer to one end of the connector)

- Drive is jumpered for the SECOND select (2 if 1,2,3,4 - 1 if 0,1,2,3)

- Drive is connected as DriveA on the cable (mainboard --- DriveB - twist - DriveA)

More debugging:

- Move it to DriveB poaition and configure BIOS: DriveB = correct type, DriveA = none
Restart in DOS mode can you> DIR B:

(move back to DriveA and "fix" BIOS to original config.

- Disconnect hard drive (power and data cables) - both to prevent spin up/down on reset and to insure no OS interference. Note hard drive config in BIOS - then set to "None" (you will neet to restore it afterwatd)

- Configure BIOS to boot from floppy A:

At RESET, drive LED should be initially OFF, then BIOS should activate drive (LED on briefly) - with BOOT disk in the drive it should then boot from it (moer drive activity)

It doesn't sound like your problem has anything to do with "dirty heads".

I recomment you grab "ImageDisk" from my "Daves Old Computers" site:

It has a pretty good description of how the floppy cable works and should be connected.

If you ever do need to clean heads, it has a very good head-cleaning function.

DOSdm wrote on 2026-10-28, 17:37:

- removed the barrel CMOS battery that I'm pretty sure was dead anyway. Did not replace with a coin battery, so there's just no CMOS.

Are you still running the system without a CMOS battery?

Dorunkāku wrote on Today, 11:19:

DOSdm wrote on 2026-10-28, 17:37:

- removed the barrel CMOS battery that I'm pretty sure was dead anyway. Did not replace with a coin battery, so there's just no CMOS.

Are you still running the system without a CMOS battery?

Yes, I'm not very confident in my soldering ability so I don't think I want to attempt this myself. A friend of mine said he could probably help me put a coin cell battery on it, but he's in the military and is busy a lot so I don't know when that will happen.

DaveDDS wrote on Today, 10:22:

So.. it works wthin W95 GUI, but not after you "Restart in DOS mode" (which would switch to BIOS drivers) - what about going to […]
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So.. it works wthin W95 GUI, but not after you "Restart in DOS mode" (which would switch to BIOS drivers) - what about going to a DOS command prompt within Win95 (which would keep with Winblows internal drivers)?

As this happened when you "knocked" the cable off, the cable is most likely the culprit.

When it was reversed, you should have seen that right away - the drive light would have been always ON.

Winblows uses it's own drivers and might be finding the drive at a different select than A:

Make sure:

- The cable is installed correctly. "twist" should be at the floppy end (not mainboard) and closest to Pin1 on the drive (twist is offset and closer to one end of the connector)

- Drive is jumpered for the SECOND select (2 if 1,2,3,4 - 1 if 0,1,2,3)

- Drive is connected as DriveA on the cable (mainboard --- DriveB - twist - DriveA)

More debugging:

- Move it to DriveB poaition and configure BIOS: DriveB = correct type, DriveA = none
Restart in DOS mode can you> DIR B:

(move back to DriveA and "fix" BIOS to original config.

- Disconnect hard drive (power and data cables) - both to prevent spin up/down on reset and to insure no OS interference. Note hard drive config in BIOS - then set to "None" (you will neet to restore it afterwatd)

- Configure BIOS to boot from floppy A:

At RESET, drive LED should be initially OFF, then BIOS should activate drive (LED on briefly) - with BOOT disk in the drive it should then boot from it (moer drive activity)

It doesn't sound like your problem has anything to do with "dirty heads".

I recomment you grab "ImageDisk" from my "Daves Old Computers" site:

It has a pretty good description of how the floppy cable works and should be connected.

If you ever do need to clean heads, it has a very good head-cleaning function.

I will try this out later today and post the results. I just wanted to add something - today after I turned on the PC and went into bios to set the turbo settings, the floppy drive flashed and made some noises. I tested a floppy disk and it did let me go to drive A and view the contents of the disk in DOS, and it did let me get to the installer menu on my TIE floppy in DOS. I decided to play Doom for a little while and then before shutting down I wanted to try my floppy disk again but now the drive is back to giving me the "not ready reading drive A" message again. Just updating in case this makes the solution more clear.

So it partially works sometimes?

Cleaning heads might help in this case.

Or could be flaky connection.. remove & firmly reseat cable (both ends) several times.

BTW, I forgot to mention that ImageDisk talks directly to the Floppy controler, using NO drivers. It can also format, read, write and scan ... pretty good way to verify hardware works without relying on other/unknown software.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on Today, 08:41:

Windows accesses the diskette drive via its own 32 bit drivers. DOS leans far more into how the BIOS is configured. Are you sure it's configured as 1.44MB 3.5" and not 1.2MB or something like that? You can force this setting by adding this line in config.sys:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\DRIVER.SYS /D:0 /F:7

Another thing worth trying: you've been playing around with CD-ROM drivers for DOS. Some of those can result in conflicts with the diskette drive. Try booting in Safe mode command prompt only and see if diskette drive works now without a loaded CD ROM drive.

DOS gives several disk error messages. The one it gave shows it saw the drive and registered A: as a valid letter.

DaveDDS wrote on Today, 16:54:

BTW, I forgot to mention that ImageDisk talks directly to the Floppy controler, using NO drivers. It can also format, read, write and scan ... pretty good way to verify hardware works without relying on other/unknown software.

Yep this is what I would do next.

Run IMD, go into the disk cleaning section and try to manually seek the drive.

DaveDDS wrote on Today, 16:54:

BTW, I forgot to mention that ImageDisk talks directly to the Floppy controler, using NO drivers. It can also format, read, write and scan ... pretty good way to verify hardware works without relying on other/unknown software.

+ 1 for this. When I had problems with my floppy cables (including a faulty one) and I was sure everything was finally connected properly, it was ImageDisk that made me realise that the heads needed cleaning.
The symptoms were exactly these, some of my floppies worked some times, others not.

DOSdm wrote on Today, 05:27:

No, after I realized the cable was flipped I made sure I aligned the pins correctly and the light doesn't stay on anymore. But the light also doesn't flicker when I boot like it's supposed to. If I put a floppy disk in the light turns on and stays solid, but only in Windows. In DOS it doesn't do anything at all.

Are you sure you didn't bend/break/flatten one of the pins on the floppy drive when the cable rippage happened?

kingcake wrote on Today, 19:16:

Run IMD, go into the disk cleaning section and try to manually seek the drive.

Good to hear it worked for you.

Just a minor correction the C)lean function "scrubs" the heads back and forth over cleaning media.

A)lign/Test is what you want for total drive control.

BTW and apologies in advance for short/mispelled posts - posting from airplane using phone touch keyboard! (and I have dexterity problems these days)

DaveDDS wrote on Today, 20:17:

Good to hear it worked for you. […]
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kingcake wrote on Today, 19:16:

Run IMD, go into the disk cleaning section and try to manually seek the drive.

Good to hear it worked for you.

Just a minor correction the C)lean function "scrubs" the heads back and forth over cleaning media.

A)lign/Test is what you want for total drive control.

Oh right I misremembered where the manual seeking was!

Not a prob (weirdly I can recall exactly what every IMD function does 😀 )

IMD can be complex and it really helps to have good understanding of floppy system technical details- the reason I put a fair bit of work into decent interactive help - I don't expect everyone to have"wasted" 😀 as much time as I in figuring floppies out 😀