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5 1/4" Floppy Drive Not Reading?

I think your drive is probably fine--the 16/12 grounding test pretty much confirms that. I suspect your cable or your motherboard. Do any other floppy drives work correctly with this cable and/or motherboard?

Floppy drives are very simple devices--not anywhere close to the complexity of a hard disk. If you can spin the motor and illuminate the LED by grounding a couple of pins, it's no different from what your motherboard should be doing.
 
It may be a few days before I can get my hands on a floppy drive. There is a computer repair/recycle place that probably has some spares for cheap. He also has a TI Insight Series 10 for $50-100. I don't know much about those, much less what the value of something like that is. I don't see any for sale anywhere, so I am assuming it is not very common..?
 
Chuck(G) said:
I think your drive is probably fine--the 16/12 grounding test pretty much confirms that. I suspect your cable or your motherboard. Do any other floppy drives work correctly with this cable and/or motherboard?

Floppy drives are very simple devices--not anywhere close to the complexity of a hard disk. If you can spin the motor and illuminate the LED by grounding a couple of pins, it's no different from what your motherboard should be doing.
Click to expand...

Well, I picked up three 3.5" floppy drives today and confirmed two of them working by formatting the disk in DOS. When I set the BIOS back to a 5.25" 1.2M floppy drive and try to format in DOS with the Chinon drive, it still says "track 0 not found, media unusable." To be sure, I set the BIOS to a 360K drive to no avail. Does this have anything to do with the disks being high density? Even then, I would think the drive would give some effort to try to read the media before refusing it. Something worth mentioning: the 3.5" drives, when in WIN98, the drive light stays on, but in DOS the light only illuminates when the disk is being read or written.
 
That LED thing is quite normal for Windows 98. Linux sometimes behaves that way also. <shrug>

If you're going to format 360K disks, they have to be double-density, (DSDD), not high-density. I've seen fully degaussed DSHD hold double-density data, but that's a bit extreme--and I doubt that you own a big enough bulk tape eraser. :)

Also, if you're not averse to running DOS (i.e. shut down Windows to a command prompt), you might try Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk. It's got all sorts of useful testing in it.
 
Chuck(G) said:
That LED thing is quite normal for Windows 98. Linux sometimes behaves that way also. <shrug>

If you're going to format 360K disks, they have to be double-density, (DSDD), not high-density. I've seen fully degaussed DSHD hold double-density data, but that's a bit extreme--and I doubt that you own a big enough bulk tape eraser. :)

Also, if you're not averse to running DOS (i.e. shut down Windows to a command prompt), you might try Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk. It's got all sorts of useful testing in it.
Click to expand...

I am trying to format high density 1.2M disks. I got ImageDisk running in DOS, then ran TESTFDC. Again, no signs of the drive actually reading the disks, but here are the results:

SD at 250 kbps - not tested
SD at 300 kbps - failed
SD at 500 kbps - failed
DD at 250 - 500 - not tested
 
CompuNurd said:
I am trying to format high density 1.2M disks. I got ImageDisk running in DOS, then ran TESTFDC. Again, no signs of the drive actually reading the disks, but here are the results:

SD at 250 kbps - not tested
SD at 300 kbps - failed
SD at 500 kbps - failed
DD at 250 - 500 - not tested
Click to expand...

Bump.
 
Have you tried TESTSD with a 3.5" drive to see if single-density even works with your system? If it doesn't, those test results are kind of meaningless, aren't they?
 
Chuck(G) said:
Have you tried TESTSD with a 3.5" drive to see if single-density even works with your system? If it doesn't, those test results are kind of meaningless, aren't they?
Click to expand...

On the 3.5" drive, single and double density seem to check out OK with TESTFDC. Again, with the 5 1/4" drive it spins up, but there are no signs of disk activity, and respectively TESTFDC fails. Would the next step be to order a different cable, find a different 5 1/4" drive, or check for bad connections on the drive motherboard?
 
Found my Chinon FZ-506, very similar drive i believe, but it works like a champ

Here is how it is jumped

TM closed
DS1 closed
MS1 closed
DC-RY closed

I noted you have your FR-506 jumped the same, does your drive have an IU jumper? If so, double check to be sure, i have been following this thread, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to go back and recheck even the simple things. Failing that, you have probably got a bad cable, or your board doesn't really support the 5.25" disks, though it says so in the bios. I've seen that in some boards, they support the lower disk types, but only for reading, not writing. My last asus, an A7V-133 was that way, very anal.
 
So I got a spare cable, and it turns out I ordered the wrong one. This one has some weird micro 34 pin connector at the end. The connectors are as follows: 5.25, 3.5, twist, 5.25, 3.5, micro 34 pin. I took the 3.5 connector after the twist and connected it to the motherboard, and the results are the same. When clicked, the drive spins up, no LED, no read activity, all it does is spin up, then complain the drive is not ready. Motherboard reads 3.5" floppies just fine, and I have gone through two cables. What else could it be besides the drive itself?
 
Well, let's see here. You said earlier that if you powered the drive up and grounded pin 12 on the interface, the LED came on. Is that still true for the drive? If you put a logic probe or a voltmeter on that pin with the cable connected, does it go low when you address the drive?
 
If I understand correctly, this is what you want me to do: Connect the drive to power and data, take a voltmeter and put one lead on pin 12, and the other lead to ground. Test the voltage between inactivity and when you try to access the drive. That is what I did, and I get 5V when the drive is inactive, and 1 - 2V when the drive is trying to be accessed.
 
That's exactly it--but 1-2 V leaves a lot for error. Try pulling the terminator and see if that voltage goes lower. You've already stated that the LED comes on when pin 12 is grounded, so it's possible that your controller doesn't pull pin 12 low enough for an active-low signal to be seen. Some of these old drives use 150 ohm pullups, which is a little more than a lot of newer CMOS drivers can handle. 1-2K should be fine as a pullup on these.
 
Well, V[sub]il[/sub] for LSTTL should be about 0.8V max. So, for whatever reason it's not getting pulled low. If you pull the drive off the PC, what resistance do you get measuring pin 12 to the +5 line on the drive? In other words, is something on the drive pulling the line too high?
 
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