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T-Squared

Veteran Member
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
657
Location
San Antonio, TX
Hey all!

Long time no see!

I finally nailed down the problem with my Zenith Supersport SX's hard drive. It was out the door already, and nothing was wrong with the power supply. Even better, it takes other hard drives as well!

Anyways, now I have a new problem. I don't trust the floppy drive that came with it. The mechanical portions seemed too sluggish, as if the disk was not going to be held in place firmly enough. I tried to use another drive, but I took it apart after I didn't trust the electronic portions on that either (seemed to have problems reading). I knocked the head out of alignment, and that was the end of that drive.


I've tried using "modern" floppy drives, but none of them work. Even testing them on my 1995 Pentium rig doesn't bring up promising results. (POST shows "Diskette A Error", but the drive does respond with its start-up realignment sequence. Trying to access the drive in DOS results in a "Drive not Ready" error.

Did the floppy drive controllers from 1995 to 2002 change in some way to render them incompatible with older hardware? (i.e. different coding or interfacing) Or have the connector pin locations changed just enough in the same fashion?
 
Ding dang it. I wanted to get this post sent so fast, I forgot to title the thread correctly. It's supposed to be "Using Newer Floppy Drives on Older Hardware".
 
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