Weird 5170 Floppy Issue

[onesimus]

Hello guys. I'm having the weirdest issue with my 5170 and 1.44mb floppy drives. The issue is that whenever I try to go into the A drive (1.44mb), the screen blanks out and I have to reboot. This does NOT happen with the B (1.2mb) drive, I can get into it and access the files fine. Additionally, the same issue happens with the A and B drives switched. I have played around with termination on the 1.2mb drive, but it doesn't seem to help either. I have also tried changing out the bios to the quadtel bios, still no luck. This has happened with both the original floppy controller and with Sergey Malinov's multi-floppy floppy controller, and the rom is loading, working, and configured. Also, this happens with both a real 1.44mb drive and a gotek.

At this point, I have no idea what is going on with it or what to try next. I thought for sure Sergey's floppy controller would fix the issue but alas, here I am.

Has anyone else faced this issue? I'm at a complete loss. Going to try to include a video to show the problem.

5170-Floppy-Issue.mp4

drive.google.com

 

[krebizfan]

I haven't been able to get to the video; Google Drive is really slow today.

My initial suspicion would be the one thing that would stay in place even when the drives are swapped. That is, the cable adapter that turns the large Molex power connector into the small 3.5" floppy power connector had a short.

 

[SomeGuy]

Does it also crash if you try to boot a floppy disk on drive a: ?

Try running ImageDisk and see what happens. Imagedisk bypasses DOS and BIOS so that might narrow down if it is a hardware problem or not.

Also does it crash on other disk operations, such as formatting a disk?

 

[onesimus]

I haven't been able to get to the video; Google Drive is really slow today.

My initial suspicion would be the one thing that would stay in place even when the drives are swapped. That is, the cable adapter that turns the large Molex power connector into the small 3.5" floppy power connector had a short.

Well, the thing is that the gotek is functioning normally. I actually had to fix that cable before, but the LCD on the gotek and the buttons and everything seem to be working normally.

That same reasoning though is why I swapped out controllers, was going by a process of elimination.

Does it also crash if you try to boot a floppy disk on drive a: ?

Try running ImageDisk and see what happens. Imagedisk bypasses DOS and BIOS so that might narrow down if it is a hardware problem or not.

Also does it crash on other disk operations, such as formatting a disk?

With the multi-floppy bios i can get it to TRY to boot, but I get bad a "bad diskette boot record" with my gotek with images that I boot from all the time otherwise.

Formatting the drive still gives me problems, even with a real drive.

I'm going to look into trying ImageDisk and possibly try a new DOS installation as well and see what happens with that.

I'll likely be updating this thread shortly, I'm going to keep trying with this stuff. or at least update this post, whichever is appropriate at the time.

 

[modem7]

Suggestions:
- Virus scan
- Delete/rename CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT

 

[onesimus]

Reporting back with "progress" so far. Completely new DOS installation does nothing. Will keep trying other posted suggestions. Also, I have now put the real 1.44mb drive in to further reduce variables. It's still doing the same thing. Again, though, will report back throughout the day.

UPDATE: I think the issue with the screen blanking was coming from my EGA/VGA card. On a hunch (long story) I took it out and replaced it with my CGA card and now the screen doesn't blank out but all I ever get is the ole "general failure reading drive a".

 

[onesimus]

UPDATE: The solution has been found! I want to make a new post in order to share it with the community as much as I can.

Ultimately, the root of the problem was my EGA/VGA card. It was configured for VGA, although it did the same on EGA. Once I put my terrible CGA card in, I could mess with the A drive without the screen blanking out. Additionally, it seems that my physical had some sort of defect or wasn't the right type. It's a teac FD-235HF drive and after looking at the manual I'm not convinced it's even a 1.44mb drive, even though it was sold to me that way. Another aspect of the solution regarding the Gotek was to just install flashfloppy. I was trying to use the original firmware but either it's practically unusable or I'm just too dumb to use it, haha. Regardless, a combination of my Gotek with flashfloppy + using the CGA card instead of the EGA/VGA card was the solution.

By the way, just so people who may have a similar problem knows, the card was a Heath 150-307-3. I love that I can get VGA out of it, but it has problems with Windows 3 and I guess certain configurations of floppy drives? I don't know. This was one of the stranger problems I've dealt with and it sent me pretty deep down the rabbit hole. Oh well, at least I learned a bunch of different stuff in the process of trying to fix it.

 

[MasawVx]

Could be some boot sector virus messing with floppy operation. Can you run my antivirus and see if it detects anything... tho mind you that it only runs on 286+ cpu

 

[onesimus]

Could be some boot sector virus messing with floppy operation. Can you run my antivirus and see if it detects anything... tho mind you that it only runs on 286+ cpu

I have essentially found a solution that works, although not greatly. It seems to be something to do with the EGA/VGA card. However, I'll still run your AV for the heck of it and let ya know.

EDIT: Scanned the computer and it seems to be okay.