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Longshine VLB IDE controller - FDD trouble

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First post, by tikoellner

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Hey there!

When I thought I have finally solved all the issues with my VLB controller (it already has LBA support after I flashed the newest BIOS).

I can't, however, get the floppy working properly.

First of all, I have enabled FDD support on the card itself, by bridging the appropriate jumper. But almost each time I turn on my computer, I get floppy disk fail (40). On some instances there is no such information, but then I get lots of "sector not found" errors.

I should add that in my motherboard BIOS I have selected 1.44 and 1.2 drives.

Now, I'm not sure if I should have done that - maybe this is handled by the VLB card's BIOS? The manual does not cover this. Is there any Promise products owner who have successfully connected floppy drive to the card? I just hope the card isn't broken.

Reply 2 of 2, by tikoellner

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Hey, thank you.

Yes, I have tested another cables - one wit only single 1.44 connector and another with 1.44 and 1.2 connector.

This seems strange, but I get the following symptoms:

- When I connect 1.44 FDD and 1.2 FDD (simultaneously), 1.2 drive works flawlessly (read/write). 1.44 is detected (I disabled floppy drive seek in BIOS), but it generates errors.
- When I connect 1.2 FDD only, the drive does not work - it generates strange noises reading any disk and finally fails to read anything (well, I can get it to read a directory, but if I try to run anything, I get errors).

So I can't simply use any single drive - it looks like the controller requires some form of "termination".

Any ideas where it leads?

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