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Compuadd 433 will not boot from 3.25 inch floppy

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smeezekitty

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Jan 15, 2010
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Washington U.S.
So I just purchased a compuadd 433 486 machine. It is built very heavy and looks brand new inside.

It has a 3.5/5.25 inch combination floppy drive but it will not boot from it.
During POST, both halves seek and flash their light but then it says "No boot device available - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility" (this is with a 3.5 inch dos boot disk in)
Pressing F1 makes the 5 inch ONLY floppy flash its light and then it says the same message.
Inserting a blank 5.25 inch floppy makes it say "Diskette read failure instead"

In case it matters, there is some type of tape drive also attached to the floopy connector.

Can someone please help? It would be appreciated!
 
smeezekitty said:
It has a 3.5/5.25 inch combination floppy drive
Click to expand...
The motherboard will 'see' that as two drives, and you need to think of it as two drives.

smeezekitty said:
During POST, both halves seek and flash their light
Click to expand...
So, I'm guessing that the motherboard's SETUP (CMOS configuration) is aware of the two drives and does a quick 'seek' check of both drives.

smeezekitty said:
but then it says "No boot device available - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility" (this is with a 3.5 inch dos boot disk in)
Pressing F1 makes the 5 inch ONLY floppy flash its light and then it says the same message.
Click to expand...
Most motherboards will only attempt a floppy boot from the floppy drive that is configured as A:
I'm guessing that the 3.5" component of the combination floppy drive is configured as B:

Take a look at the jumpers/switches at the rear of the combination floppy drive. You may be able to reconfigure things so that the 3.5" component is A: and the 5.25" component is drive B:
You would then need to adjust the motherboard's SETUP to cater for that swap.
 
Thanks for the fast responses. I got it figured out.
I disconnected the tape drive which was on the first connection of the floppy cable and I connected it to the floppy deck.
This leaves the floppies connected to the first connector and the second connector unattached. For whatever reason, this fixed it.

It is now happily booting my (3.5) DOS floppy.
Default

You can't boot from a blank disk... you need a DOS system disk.
Click to expand...
LOL I don't have a way to write to 5.25 disks.

Now my next venture will be figuring out how to configure the hard disk, then eventually how to upgrade the RAM
 
I keep getting read and write failures on drive C and scandisk shows hundreds of bad blocks near the end of the disk. I wonder do I have the BIOS misconfiguration for the C/H/S or do I really have a flaky drive?

Also, there is 8 30-pin memory modules installed and the RAM reads an odd value of 7808K
I was wondering if I could get it up to 16MB?
 
It's not unusual for hdd to go flakey over time. I've had a couple on various platforms go bad. Could come right after a few power cycles though. Do double check the C/H/S are correct though for peace of mind if you like. Usually the system just wont boot from the hdd if they are incorrect though.
 
Caluser2000 said:
It's not unusual for hdd to go flakey over time. I've had a couple on various platforms go bad. Could come right after a few power cycles though. Do double check the C/H/S are correct though for peace of mind if you like. Usually the system just wont boot from the hdd if they are incorrect though.
Click to expand...
The thing is, the drive is a Quantum Prodrive LPS that does not say the C/H/S on it at all.
I used this to configure it: http://www.computerhope.com/hdquantu.htm#prodrive assuming 120 MB

Should I just let scandisk run and mark many blocks bad?
 
I mounted it in another system and it turns out it is a 240 MB drive. I reset the BIOS and now I am trying to fix the corruption.
The external(!) CMOS battery is dead so I guess I will have to replace that. Great idea though so it doesn't leak and damage the mobo
 
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