Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

....and now it's time for the fun to begin.

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

Just make sure to pick up one of these

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I already beat you to it. I also ordered a nice black ALPS/IBM floppy drive to go with it.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I think I'm going to need a little help setting up my 1.44meg drive. I have run into a few problems.

Firstly, I just want to make clear that I am running a high density controller, and have set the jumpers on the card and XT motherboard corrctly. I have my 1.44MB floppy as A: and my 360k drive as B:. The drive works to some extent as I was able to install my Sound Blaster 2.0 software that came on 720kb floppy disk. However, I can't seem to get the drive to work at all with the 1.44meg disks. I can read the contents of the disk, but I can't read or write files to them. I have added the line in my config.sys DRIVPARM= /D:0 /F:7. Additionally, I can't seem to boot from the 1.44meg drive. Though, I haven't tried 720k disks. When I have a 1.44meg disk in the drive, it simply boots and ignores the contents of the drive. This sucks!

Guest

depending on the card used you may not need any drivparm statement.

try this, take a 1.44 dos disk ver 3.30 or 4 or 5 and try booting the machine with it.
( a win9.x bootdisk may not boot as it requires morte memory.

cards like the compaticard don't have a bios as such, but use a specific driver.

the dtk card was flakey and did not work properly
other cards like the ios-2 work at bootup with a menu .
some of the lcs cards support hd floppies on a xt/8088.
but i am unsure how.

drivparm is useful to get a 8088 to recognize a 3.5" floppy as a 720k

a controller with a bios or something like the compaticrd is needed for a 1.44 or 1.2m floppy.

most, if not all xt/8088 will boot properly from a 720k bootdisk
or a 1.44 drive with a 720k floppy.

but will format it as a 360k UNLESS the drivparm statement is in the config.sys

a 8088 will never recognize a 1.2m ,
but will see a 1.44 disk if formatted to 720k. and the 2nd hole is taped over.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I am beginning to think my high density controller may be defective. I removed all cards from my system except the video controller. I checked the cables several times, and even tried a different set of cables. I tried different drives and different disks. I checked jumper settings. Nothing I do will make this card do it's job. I think I am going to try to get a replacement. The product description of this card is quite clear, and there seems to be no reason why it shouldn't be working on my true blue IBM XT.

Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 7:14 am

Did you try another system? Sometimes one system doesn't like a particular card.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I found something in the documentation for the controller about how the drives need to be jumpered as DS1. I guess I'm going to have to locate an older 3.5" drive that includes these jumpers

Guest

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think I'm going to need a little help setting up my 1.44meg drive. I have run into a few problems.

Firstly, I just want to make clear that I am running a high density controller, and have set the jumpers on the card and XT motherboard corrctly. I have my 1.44MB floppy as A: and my 360k drive as B:. The drive works to some extent as I was able to install my Sound Blaster 2.0 software that came on 720kb floppy disk. However, I can't seem to get the drive to work at all with the 1.44meg disks. I can read the contents of the disk, but I can't read or write files to them. I have added the line in my config.sys DRIVPARM= /D:0 /F:7. Additionally, I can't seem to boot from the 1.44meg drive. Though, I haven't tried 720k disks. When I have a 1.44meg disk in the drive, it simply boots and ignores the contents of the drive. This sucks!

it seems your controller works as double density mode , not the high density mode .Have you try with only the 1.44M FD ? My DTK PII-151B could only work with one type driver at a time.

Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:54 pm

Did you get your FDC to boot from a 1.44 floppy?

I too am having this problem with my no name brand Chinese FDC.

As far as FDC's go, I had my hopes set on a Seagate/Conner controller which they sold for use with tape drives that connected via the floppy interface, however it appears that even though the card is an 8 bit ISA card, that it does not work in an XT as it will not even boot from a 360K floppy.

I am also wondering if the 16 bit Adaptec 1522 SCSI/FDC will work in an XT as a floppy controller as I would next expect to have any issues with an Adaptec controller?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

No, I never got my MCT/Unique/Ablytech high density floppy controller working properly. It seems the likely cause is a corrupt ROM image. I went ahead and ordered a different card to try, but I have my doubts about it. Also, I am not sure that all high density controllers allow you to boot from the A:. I think some may also require a device driver to see the 1.44meg drive.

As far as I know, there are no 16-bit adaptec cards that will function in an 8-bit slot as SCSI. But, I am not sure about the floppy portion of the card. But, I am pretty sure the adaptec cards don't support high density drives directly, since that function would already be on the AT motherboard. One thing I did try was a SCSI --> Floppy converter board for Teac drives. It's pretty interesting, but it requires an additional device driver that eats up memory. I also was only able to get it going on my Trantor card, and not my Future Domain. Future Domain recommended some program from Corel for support, but I couldn't find it. I think it was just called "Corel SCSI".

Joined: 19 Nov 2007 Posts: 1 Location: minneapolis

Anonymous Coward wrote:

No, I never got my MCT/Unique/Ablytech high density floppy controller working properly. It seems the likely cause is a corrupt ROM image.

Easy way to test this: A corrupt ROM image won't be executed by the BIOS.
ROMs are checksummed before being launched at POST, so if your chip was bad, the BIOS would just skip it.

If the ROM image contains (c) strings or other messages during POST, your ROM is fine. If you're not seeing any strings come up during post, then it is very possible that the BIOS is skipping the ROM, and now you've got uninitialized hardware sitting between the floppy drive and the motherboard, which could cause all sorts of problems.

Much less easy way to test:
The next place to look to see if the BIOS loaded your floppy ROM is to check where the vector for INT 13h is pointing. If the segment is pointing into somewhere in the F000 range, it hasn't been revectored by the floppy controller. If it points to D000 (or wherever your card's BIOS is installed) then it is. Of course DOS and other floppy drivers are probably going to hook their own routines in that vector, so you might have to trace through some code before you jump into the ROM. There are ways of capturing the vector table before DOS/drivers load up, so if you want to check this, let me know and I can point you in the right direction.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

There was a strange cable adapter I had once that converted a 5 1/4" floppy cable to a 3.5" cable end, it also had an A/B switch and I believe a D0/D1/D2/D3 switches along with read only? switch and something else I can't remember. I ended up selling it with an old compaq deskpro 386dx-16 as I didn't have extra cabling at that time, maybe it was worth keeping? (I doubt it)

I have a feeling that if you look at the wiring of the floppy connector you could twist your own cable to be properly setup as DS1 (isn't that the 2nd drive)

Also I have a floppy drive in my old Futura 100 (my first one) that has about 12+ jumpers on it. I will have to dig it out and provide you with the model # and brand of the drive so you can maybe find one should cabling prove too elusive. I have a feeling that could be setup in many different ways, only problem is I believe it was an old 720k drive from about 1990 or so. Though it isn't labled either way.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

There was a strange cable adapter I had once that converted a 5 1/4" floppy cable to a 3.5" cable end, it also had an A/B switch and I believe a D0/D1/D2/D3 switches along with read only?

Yeah, I have a couple of those somewhere (except they've only got D0/D1 switches. Handy when all you've got is a cable with two 5 1/4" connectors on the end.

I'm right now doing a "Super XT" conversion (kinda sacrilege, but would look cool if finished):

450MHz K6II CPU on a Soyo SY-5EH5 Baby-AT MoBo, 512MB Ram, 6.4GB Maxtor HDD, DVD+/-RW (all drives are black and have a 1/2-height "classic black w/red LED" bezel for the HDD). This project has been "lying around" since '02. The case was an upgraded Hauppauge XT to 386 conversion (with 250W P/S---remember when people payed >$1200 to have it done?) and I've got a genuine XT top cover (new) for it---old top is scratched and has the Hauppauge label instead of the original "IBM Personal Computer XT". Maybe put DSL or Deli on it, since XP would likely crawl (though "XP on an XT" has a nice ring to it).

I'd love to find an old EGA monitor (non-working) and see if I could somehow fit a flat-panel display in it...