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Full-height Tandon 5.25" and generic 3.5" floppy drive on the same cable?

Windows 10 support for floppy drives has varied. Early releases lacked the driver; the driver got added back in so I have read a few floppies on a Win10 system; I haven't tried in a while so there may have been a regression in one of the more recent updates.
 
Well 3.1 was a flop, I forgot it needed to run on DOS and I don't have a copy of that. *head-desk*

I was able to install a copy of XP though, but I'm still getting an IO error with the Tandon connected solo as drive A.

And for the record, Windows 10 recognizes my USB 3.5" floppy drive.
 
Yes, but USB floppies are a very different animal. More akin to SCSI floppies.

The problem with diagnosis using any variety of Windows NT (NT 3.1->W10) is that the floppy controller is abstracted under a pretty thick layer of drivers, so it's difficult to see what's going on.

You really need to boot DOS, or alternatively Win 9x to figure out what's happening.

You can create a "naked" MSDOS boot disk from Windows XP, but no utilities. Take a look at FreeDOS--an adequate MS-DOS substitute.
 
Fire-Flare said:
I may have stumbled across something as well. I tried a half-height 360kb drive in the system and it's booting properly but not accessible in Windows 7 either.

Perhaps Windows 7 is the problem and doesn't support 360kb drives? (My Google searches won't give me a straight answer)


I'm going to try installing Windows 3.1 from the 3.5" drive and see what happens in there.
Click to expand...

Windows 7 DOES NOT support 360k drives. I've tried it, it doesn't work. In fact, I'm not sure anything newer than Windows 2000 supports 360k drives.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Yes, but USB floppies are a very different animal. More akin to SCSI floppies.

The problem with diagnosis using any variety of Windows NT (NT 3.1->W10) is that the floppy controller is abstracted under a pretty thick layer of drivers, so it's difficult to see what's going on.

You really need to boot DOS, or alternatively Win 9x to figure out what's happening.

You can create a "naked" MSDOS boot disk from Windows XP, but no utilities. Take a look at FreeDOS--an adequate MS-DOS substitute.
Click to expand...

I installed FreeDOS and plugged in your format command; It got to 100% then gave me an error.

But that's the closest it's come to working so far. :D
 
Looks like that's still a known problem in FreeDOS I suspect that if you take the disk just formatted and do a FORMAT A:, it'll be fine.

But it sounds as if the 5.25" drive is working as it should. The next thing is to combine the 5.25" and 3.5' on the same cable and go from there.

If you want something that's a little more mainstream, try Caldera's DR-DOS 7.03 There's also a DR-DOS 8.0 out there, but I'm not sure of its ownership or distribution status.

In any case, you'll want to pick up a copy of Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk for whatever DOS you use (it doesn't run under Windows of any flavor). You'll see a lot of references to .IMD files for various platforms in this forum and this is the tool to use with them. It also has a bunch of disk diagnostic and testing utilities.
 
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. So basically the drive's the same (nothing changed on the drive itself), but just a different position on the cable (the "straight" section, not the part after the twist), correct? We know the drive is fine, so that leaves two possibilities:

1. The cable is somehow faulty. Try adding the 3.5" drive as B: and leave the 5.25" as A:. Does the 3.5' respond?
2. There's really no support for two drives on the motherboard, no matter what anyone says. I've seen this with some Intel ICH-based boards (which yours is). We can try some DEBUG commands to verify that.

So, let's narrow things down. First, try suggestion 1. Is the 3.5" drive as B: dead?
 
Fire-Flare said:
I'm confident that the board does support dual floppies, that's why I ordered it.

I can configure drive A and B's size and capacity in the BIOS and Windows 7 shows both in My Computer.
Click to expand...
I can do that too with my ABIT AM2 board. That's why I ordered my board too back than. But as Chuck correctly pointed out, my MoBo supports only one drive A: in reality.
 
archeocomp said:
I can do that too with my ABIT AM2 board. That's why I ordered my board too back than. But as Chuck correctly pointed out, my MoBo supports only one drive A: in reality.
Click to expand...

One of the issues that's sometimes run across with boards is that the vendor uses a commodity BIOS without "customizing" the options. Floppy settings mostly affect the "CMOS" (RTC) memory and may not actually reflect the hardware supported--i.e. there are no physical circuit board traces to support a second drive.

One way you can verify this is to identify the chip supporting the floppy and look at the datasheet. It's not uncommon for ICH-related chips to give the implementor options on how certain pins are configured. For example, you my be offered the option of configuring for parallel port and 1 floppy or two floppies and no parallel port. The thing to know is that internally, there is still working circuitry for the second floppy drive (i.e. drive and unit selects), but that there's no external interface for it.
 
Well, to verify that the board properly supports dual drives, a simple way would be to just grab a second 3.5" drive and see if two 3.5" drives work together. Take the Tandon out of the equation for a minutes.

Another sort of random thought, the manual shows an "MX" switch/jumper next to the drive selects that apparently enables the drive logic even when it is not selected. You don't have that turned on or jumpered do you? That could cause problems if it were on in a dual drive setup.
 
SomeGuy said:
Well, to verify that the board properly supports dual drives, a simple way would be to just grab a second 3.5" drive and see if two 3.5" drives work together. Take the Tandon out of the equation for a minutes.

Another sort of random thought, the manual shows an "MX" switch/jumper next to the drive selects that apparently enables the drive logic even when it is not selected. You don't have that turned on or jumpered do you? That could cause problems if it were on in a dual drive setup.
Click to expand...

I thought of that as well, I 'rescued' a few extra floppy drives to test that theory when I get home.

I'm not sure what "MX" is and I don't see the option in my online manual. Wikipedia says it's 'maximum performance mode' for 8086/286 processors?
 
If you're really curious, try the following DEBUG script (run under DOS);

Code: 
C:\>debug
-o3f2 1c
-o3f2 2d
-q

Just type in the stuff after the "-" prompt. The first will turn on the A: drive (you'll see the LED go on and the motor spin). The second does the same for the B: drive. Of course, if the B: drive isn't supported, nothing will happen.
 
Short for "Multiplex". Some early drive boxes drove only a single drive and didn't use the usual DSx and motor control lines. Usually, , the drive selects according to DSx and motor lines; i.e., the floppy bus is "multiplexed" among several drives. This goes along with such arcane and forgotten oddities such as "binary select", where DS0-3 represents a binary number, so as to allow for up to 16 drives on a single cable.
 
Chuck(G) said:
If you're really curious, try the following DEBUG script (run under DOS);

Code: 
C:\>debug
-o3f2 1c
-o3f2 2d
-q

Just type in the stuff after the "-" prompt. The first will turn on the A: drive (you'll see the LED go on and the motor spin). The second does the same for the B: drive. Of course, if the B: drive isn't supported, nothing will happen.
Click to expand...

Looks like the board only supports one drive. >_<

Will Windows 98se support a USB floppy drive?
 
Fire-Flare said:
Looks like the board only supports one drive. >_<

Will Windows 98se support a USB floppy drive?
Click to expand...

All the USB floppy drives I have work with Win98SE. These need special drivers for Win98SE so try to make sure they have driver CD or that the manufacturers still permits downloads. Some of the more recent USB floppy drives don't include Win98 drivers so check compatibility.
 
krebizfan said:
All the USB floppy drives I have work with Win98SE. These need special drivers for Win98SE so try to make sure they have driver CD or that the manufacturers still permits downloads. Some of the more recent USB floppy drives don't include Win98 drivers so check compatibility.
Click to expand...

And oddly enough, some USB drives support only high-density (1.44M) and not double (720K). So pick your drive carefully. I've had good luck with Teac units.
 
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