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Floppy drive issue with a 486

J

Jibbajaba

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 12, 2007
Messages
190
Location
Davis, CA 95616 USA
I hope this is the right forum in which to post this...

So today I moved my 486 into a new case. Hooked everything up, and it wouldn't boot. After a bunch of messing around, I then discovered that if I turn the floppy drive cable around on the back on the floppy drive, the system will boot, but then the floppy drive light stays on (because the cable is in backwards.) I kept tinkering with it and basically what I have discovered is that somehow through the process of moving everything over, the 1.44MB floppy got fried or otherwise seems to have gone bad. If I hook up only the 1.2MB drive as the "A" drive, the system boots normally and I can read 5.25" disks, but as soon as I plug the other floppy back in, the system won't boot.

Maybe this is not uncommon, but I have never seen it before. Can a bad floppy cause the system to not even boot? What's going on for this to happen? IS the BIOS waiting for some sort of signal from the drive before it commences booting?

A brand new floppy drive is probably going to run me like $5 at Fry's, so I don't care about that, but I have just never seen behavior like this before. I was really concerned that I had done something disasterous to my computer, so I am relieved to see that it is just a drive.

Chris
 
Can a bad floppy cause the system to not even boot? What's going on for this to happen? IS the BIOS waiting for some sort of signal from the drive before it commences booting?
Click to expand...
The BIOS will normally time-out after a while, but sometimes that can be a very long time. I got caught a few weeks back with a 486 in which I'd forgotten to remove an extra hard drive from the BIOS setup. The 486 appeared to hang just after the BIOS splash screen was displayed. Eventually the BIOS timed out waiting for the non-existent hard drive, but that was about 2 MINUTES later. 2 minutes !!
 
Hi
Did you change cables? It might be that you used a pin swapped
in one case and a straight through cable on the other.
Dwight
 
I figured out the problem. There is a loose connection somewhere in the floppy cable. I just need to find a new one. I'll post a wanted ad here in the wanted section, and check the local electronics surplus place on Wednesday.

Chris
 
OK maybe I didn't figure out the problem. It also might be a bad IDE cable or something. The thing is, sometimes the computer boots, and sometimes it doesn't. Could anything else be causing this?

Chris
 
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