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2 floppy disc drives?

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9 replies

by supz

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Hello. I recently added a second floppy disc drive to my 500 mhz cpu. when booting the system I am recieving an error "DISC DRIVE ERROR 40" or something very similar to this. I turned notifications off in bios to avoid that annoyance. I changed BIOSthen to see that the secondary on the floppy IDE was a 1.44 mb floppy drive, the same as the primary. Still, that same damn error came up. That was the point where I turned the notifications off and booted into windows where it then saw the new floppy drive and assigned it drive B in addition to drive A which was the old floppy. Yet the green lights on them are on 24/7 and they wont read discs now. Any ideas what is wrong? is the floppy drive I added broken possibly? Ive tried almost everything. Thanks a lot.

9 replies

by jackofalltech

It sounds like one of the cables got twisted. Make sure pin 1 on the cable (red edge) is going to pin 1 on the drive.

Ralph

by vinnyd

The LED on the floppy drives should not stay on!

When they do it means that the Flat cable is on backwards on one or both floppies.

Unplugged the cable from one floppy and boot, check to see if the led goes out.

If not, power off, switch the connector 180 degrees and plug it back in.

Then try and boot again. The led should come on and then go out.

When it does go out, now power off and plug the 2nd connector into the 2nd floppy drive.

Follow the same procedure.

by nerdy

Also there might be a twist in center the actual cable on one end --make sure the twisted end it to the floppy drive.

by thechas

Make sure that the twist in the floppy cable is between drive B and Drive A.

It should go:
Motherboard
Drive B
TWIST
Drive A

As stated, either 1 floppy is plugged in backwards. (Not likely as Windows sees both floppy drives.)
Or, both drives are connected as Drive A or B.

While not common on 3 1/2" drives, I have seen drives with jumper and switch settings to identify the drive as A or B, allowing the use of a straight cable.

While I haven't seen them since 5 1/4" drives, thereused to be termination resistors that had to be plugged into the last drive.
Modern floppy controllers do NOT need these resistors.

Chas

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