First post, by konc
- Rank
- l33t
OK it seems that floppy drives don’t like me lately. I’ve got a very weird problem that I’ll try to describe along with the steps I’ve taken, mostly looking for ideas since this is quite unusual.
The problem: It’s a 386DX/40 dos 6.22-only. When trying to access the floppy drive in any way, eg. dir a: - copy a file - anything the drive light goes on, there is no mechanical movement at all and it fails with the classic “not ready reading drive a: abort, retry, fail” after a while. The message appears delayed when compared to not having a disk in the drive.
What I’ve tried:
-Brand new 1.44 floppy drives, confirmed working on another pc
-Changing the drive with a 5.25 one, also confirmed working
-Trying to access drive b: with both drives connected
-BIOS: reset settings, default settings, triple-checking drives types are correct, lower all timing to the lowest possible
-I/O card: works on another pc but I also tried other ISA slots and another I/O card and floppy cable just in case with the exact same behavior.
-Changed literally all the components: VGA, RAM SIMMs, disabled cache, another PSU, disconnected HDD. Booted clean from another HDD and different dos version, tried to boot without HDD from floppy.
Weirdly I have absolutely no other indication of problem with the system. It’s heavily used running games, demos, benchmarks in loop, memtest86+, not a single glitch. Just the floppy. So I guess only the motherboard remains to blame, right? OK I agree. But what on earth could be the problem on a m/b without onboard I/O and no apparent other problem? I hope someone has some idea on where to start looking, as I have no clue what else to check/replace.
What can cause such a behavior on a motherboard without onboard I/O?