PS/2 Model 30-286 refusing to format disks

[drdanj]

Hello,
Model 30-286, replaced capacitors in floppy drive, reads disks fine, booting to PC-DOS 7 from XTIDE BIOS enabled IDE HDD, drive heads cleaned with a cleaning disk.

Refuses to format anything either 1.44mb or 720k either with its native drive or a gotek+flashfloppy. "invalid media or track 0 bad - disk unusable" every time. If I try and recreate the reference disk it give a bit more detail - it'll be some sector on track 0 with a bad CRC or no address mark, but the same issue persists. Could it be that all my floppies are duff? I sincerely doubt this, I've even been unable to reformat ones that I know are good (via checking with a greaseweazle etc, etc). I'm also able to write files quite happily to floppies, this seems to be an issue with formatting.

Any ideas? :S

 

[drdanj]

I'm going to add another data point - fdform can format and verify both 720k and 1.44mb disks on this machine happily, but if I then try to reformat using the DOS format program it still fails...

 

[drdanj]

I'll tie this off. Running the startup disc yet again and resetting the configuration (despite nothing having changed) seems to have put it back to rights. Clearly something got corrupted in the cmos that the bios wasn't noticing!