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COMPAQ Portable 386 Floppy Issue

teitoku233

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Apr 12, 2022
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I recently picked up this Compaq Portable 386 at a garage sale, the machine is in overall good shape except the hard drive is dead. I managed to let it boot off of an CF-IDE card, and just after replacing the 5.25" floppy drive with a 3.5" floppy drive, the computer displayed an 601 "diskette controller error" while booting, and the message even after I put back the original 5.25 drive". Power is going to the drive as I can see it spinning briefly and then stopping. Any clues? Is it a issue with the setup or is it a issue with the floppy controller chip? (P.S. I tried putting in another working 5.25" floppy drive from my IBM and it still won't work.)
 
Are you attempting to use a 360K drive or a 1.2MB drive? I seem to recall people talking about the compaq 386 defaulting to expect a 1.2MB drive.
 
Are you attempting to use a 360K drive or a 1.2MB drive? I seem to recall people talking about the compaq 386 defaulting to expect a 1.2MB drive.
I used the drive compaq shipped with the computer, a 5.25'' drive that is dual speed
 
I used the drive compaq shipped with the computer, a 5.25'' drive that is dual speed
I tried several drives of different capacities but the error code still popped up, I suspect it's due to some settings on the motherboard getting messed up, but how?
 
Could be the settings in the BIOS. I don't know how you enter the BIOS on the 386 portable, perhaps someone knows. Could be the drive is faulty. Spinning briefly and then stopping is part of the self test when booting.
 
Compaq of that era require a floppy disk or two to do the setup. They were still coping IBM closely I guess. :)
 
Ah yes need a floppy for bios access, need to configure floppy in bios to boot. Guess it will default to the 5.25 drive then. Bios programs for compaqs are found in softpaqs btw.

It could be the controller is broken, that is the error message. Is it integrated? Maybe socketed and you can re-seat it.
 
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