Dead A: drives

G

Guest

Guest
Crazy making. I used DCC to successfully connect two different win98se boxes on a serial cable (parallel would not work) I transfered some files,disconnected the DCC and discovered that the one machine reports "floppy disk fail (40)" on boot up and will not read drive A:(even with new floppy and cable). The second box will read A: but gives garbled description of files and will not let you access files in either win or dos. Everything else works fine on both machines and they function on the peer to peer just fine. I have removed DCC on both boxes swapped cables and drives and nada! There are no conflicts evident in control panel/system/devices.

Everything was fine before I got adventurous. How do I format and rebuild without A drives? How do I get them back?

Anyone got a hammer?
 

hollett

Distinguished
Jun 5, 2001
246
0
18,710
It's a bit of a long shot, but you could try one of these two-
1) Resetting the Bios (Normaly a jumper on the MoBo).
2) Conect the drive up as the second fdd on the cable (The connector before the twist). Go into the Bios set A: drive to disabled/None and B: drive to 1.44MB (or relivent size) and look for an option "Swap FDD Order" enable and check.

Only the insane prosper.
Only those who prosper can judge what is sane.
 
G

Guest

Guest
I just did as you suggested re swapping drives and it failed boo hoo. I also disabled the on-board FDC and the error on boot changed to "Floppy disks fail 9(C0)" It looks like the floppy controllers on the MB are toast and yet the Parallel ports are OK. Weird. I am reluctant to flash BIOS as I will not be able to rebuild if no A: drive. Thanks for your help, everything I do at least narrows it down.
 

TRENDING THREADS