Troubleshooting floppy drive and cdrom

[COLN]

I'm looking at our last donation, a 133mhz 586. It has a BIOSTAR motherboard but manual is unavailable. It boots up just fine with just the hard drive. MY COMPUTER shows the floppy drive but no cdrom. If you attempt to use the floppy drive with a regular 1.44 disk, it immediately locks up the pc. You have to use reset. However if you insert a floppy driver cleaner disk, it works normally. CDROM is totally invisible. This is what I have tried. Changed to new cables, made sure cable orientation was correct. Installed a new floppy drive with the same results. So is this a donation of "parts" or can it be rescued?

[Rocketmech]

Try reloading the bios defaults and be sure the bios is correctly detecting the drives during post. You dont mention the OS , but check Device Manager for flags (!). You might have to remove and let widows redetect and install again.

[FijiJohn]

Do you see the CD in POST? Have you checked the BIOS settings for the floppy? (I've seen cases where the floppy was set to 5.25 or 3.5 but wrong density - very confusing at first.)

However, even as someone who maintains donated 486's, a 133 Pentium looks pretty slow and old.

[COLN]

FDD is enabled (1.44) in BIOS No flags in device manager. The lights on the floppy and cdrom flash briefly during bootup. No CDRom is listed though in system configuration during bootup. The system is running WIN98SE which I plan to remove if we can get things working. Is it possible that the secondary ide and floppy controller could both be non functional?

[FijiJohn]

Originally posted by COLN
Is it possible that the secondary ide and floppy controller could both be non functional?

Possible but it seems unlikely. I'd keep looking for other causes (unless the lure of such a slow machine fades ).

[Bovon]

Disconnect the CD drive and connect the hard drive to the secondary controllers. See if that will find the hard drive. In the older bios'es, the CD drive would not be found if the controller in the bios was set to auto. In the bios'es that did not have a CD rom position in the secondary controller, set it to none. If the floppy drive is showing up in the bios detect menu, and in Windows...there is nothing wrong with the controller..maybe a screwed up floppy drive.

[COLN]

In BIOS everything other than the hard drive is set to NONE, It isn't likely that it is the floppy drive as after trying a brand new one, we tried several in our stock pile. I'll try the switch to the secondary IDE on Monday. When I tried loading system defaults, it changed only one thing, not for the better though. It changed EDO Dram installed from Enabled to Disabled and the system wouldn't finish bootup. I must be missing something in BIOS but can't see it If you stopped by our center you surely would think you had done a time travel stint backwards. Nothing we own comes even close to new, well maybe the AMD 500mhz. If it plugs in and works, we keep it as we always have more teens than pc's. I'm still looking for a socket three cpu for another 133 pc I think works but has none!

[Direct1]

Have you scanned for a virus? There are some that disable floppy drives. Good luck!