I'm stumped

[jodewnz]

I have a 486 dx2 66 (don't laugh I'm a Very poor student) on a FIC 486-GVT-2 board with award modular bios v4.50.This board has no disk controllers. I use a 16 bit isa multi i/o card for my disks. However I cannot get any floppy drive to work. I had acess to another similar computer(different board and bios) and swapped things around. Everthing worked on the other computer but not mine. The drive used to work
but I didn't own it when it stopped working. Power is fine(used
an adapter for a 5.25 power supply that I know is good) I have tried a different controller and a combination of three different cables and drioves. I have win95 and have used different settings. I have stripped down the system to only a floppy and to no avail. I have tried using debug and using the bios routine (int13) to access it but exactly the same symptoms as with a dos access...That is the drive motor turns on normally and then the heads move as though it is looking for track 0.Then the dreaded error message...General error reading drive a.
The floppy is set correctly in cmos and passes the POST. When I try to format a disk in win95 it freezes and in dos it says "bad media or track 00 bad disk unusable"
Any suggestion welcome.

[TigerStrike2]

Perhaps a problem with the mobo detecting the floppy controler card or a problem with the BIOS settings for your drive. There are different bios settings for 1.44 drives and 720KB drives (if its really old - museum piece...)

Thats about all I can think of... hope it helps!

[jodewnz]

All the other things on the card work (hard disk controller serial and parallel ports)
Could it be that only the floppy controller is the problem-remembering that it works onanother computer and used to work on this one. The bios is realitively new (12/2/93) for a 486 so there should be no problems there.

[hesscomputer]

Go into the bios and disable Switch Floppy A B
then enable Seek floppy
May you change the ISA slot and clean the connection sides of the controller with a Rubber you use to erase pencil writings
If this doesn't help make a bios reset by taking out the battery and the power supply cables for at least 10 minutes.
then connect only the floppy drive and look if it works.
be sure to set the Floppy drive to the right specifications.
To use the Drive as A: you should connect the cable with the longer cable side to the controller and the other side where the red marking is to connect to the side if No.1 pin .
after the twisted portion in the cable to the floppy and here also red marking to the Pin No 1.
If you get a error bad media track then this means the Floppy disk is either not formatted or is bad .

[Bear]

I had an old 486 and had the same problem.
I finally went into cmos setup and changed
the 1.44 floppy to a 720KB floppy and then it worked fine for all disks. The drive itself was a 1.44 , I still don't know why that worked. It's worth a try.