old Packard Bell floppy problem

[FijiJohn]

I am trying to fix the floppy in a school's old PB430A. I THINK it is a 1.44 floppy (how can yu tell for sure??) but it is tad different than any of my spares. It has one pin missing in (and the cable has that hole blocked). All of my floppy spares have all their pins and when I try a different cable to the mobo I get "configuration error - fix settings". The BIOS (such as it is) shows the 2 floppies (5.25 - 1.2 and 3.5 - 1.44). The oginal floppy gives me a drive failure error on startup. I have a floppy from another Packard Bell and it does not cause any boot errors but neither can it read or write to any disks. This belongs to a VERY poor school (even poorer than the poor one I have been helping a lot). They are REALLY hoping I can do something. :(

[Ammok]

Try taking it apart, carefully. it sounds like you got the oldest of old stuff there and much of what is available just won't work with your kit.

You could try a direct approach to packard bell asking them what disks can be added to relpace the broken one, there just might be a way.

There is a good chance the floppy drive you took out was manufactured to use 700kb disks and not 1.44 floppies. You might be able to get some old 700kb floppies from old people and see if your new drive will read/write to them.(a 700kb floppy has only one hole in the case where a 1.44 has the "write protect" hole on one side and an additional fixed hole on the opposite side)

Only other bet is to find an old pc that matches your configuration and has still working fdd.:(

[FijiJohn]

Well, the BIOS offers 1.44 (as well as the 720). I will try PB directly and see if they will help. We have such an odd assortment of cast-offs here it is unlikely we can find anything too comparable. [We even have some old Leading Edge 8086s with 110V only power supplies (we are on 230V). That's OLD!!)

[Ammok]

Ok, then...

If the bios says it can support 1.44 then the read and write operations are just cable oriented. That is, the cable that works with the defunct PB original, may not be the correct cable for the "new" 1.44 floppyDD.

So, it might just be worthwhile getting an old 34way "modern" floppy ribbon cable and trying it out. If I remember correctly, there is also a floppy cable that has a few ribbons split from the bunch and reversed, try and get one of those also and try it out, if you haven't already tried that.

Sometimes the floppy disk controller card or chip in the older machines fail and there is nothing you can do about it. Have you tried the broken floppy in the other PB to see if it works in it.?

[FijiJohn]

Sad t say, the 'other' PB laying about is totally defunct (apparently a mobo failure, thus a possible source of some parts) so I cannot test anything with it. I did try a cable and floppy from another (P166) box, but the PB BIOS continues to report 'floppy failure' on POST. :(

[FijiJohn]

Hmmm, all caboes are not alike even when they look alike. I pulled the cable and floppy out of my favorite backup box (an old AMD K6-2/266) and used that. It works! However, I now cannot seem to boot from a Win95 floppy. It says, the compression driver cannot be set up correclty. Get a version from your vendor. I think maybe I better post this problem as a new thread.

[Ammok]

At least your getting there.....slowly, but at least your narrowing down the problem.