EZ-Trak DX won't read the Floppy Drive...

[DNCII]

We had the dreaded motherboard-eaten-by-the-CMOS-battery syndrome and successfully (???) replaced it with a Pentium 200Mhz and a whopping 64 MB of RAM...runs like a champ!

The only glitch we have now is that it won't read anything from the Floppy drive so I can't run my slick Mastercam programs that I've written.

When we swapped in the new MB, I switched the Hard drive and the floppy to the on-board controllers. I kept the old drive control board and hooked the serial port to it only...i didn't know which port on the MB was correct.

Anyway, when i boot up, if i set the bios to seek the Floppy, it will halt and give me a floppy failure message, press F1 and it will continue and everything else works fine. Try to load a program and it can't read the drive. The light comes on like it's trying, but it finally says that there are no programs on the disk. They're there.

I tried another FDD, same thing. I reversed one end of the data cable, just in case, it just left the green light on continually...all errors were the same.

I switched the data cable back to the old controller board...same results.

How likely is it that it's just a bad data cable? It seems to be the only thing that i didn't try to change.

I messed with some BIOS settings but nothing helped. Is there one I missed? When we installed the MB, I pretty much just set the date and the clock and it ran.

Any help would be appreciated!!!!

Thanks everyone.

Don

[dreammstr6]

if i understand corectly you have onboard drive controllers on the new motherboard and you put the old drive controller in also. usually when you do this it will conflict. you will need to go into the bios and disable the onboard drive controllers and use the add in drive controller if your going to keep it onboard. this should fix the problem. you may need to disable the onboard serial and parallel ports also. hope this helps.

[DNCII]

Thanks for the reply!

I thought of that one too. But I hooked the Hard Drive to the on-board parallel and it worked from the git go. I hooked the FDD to the "card" and disabled the on-board FDD controller...no luck.

The more I've been thinking about it, I'm gonna try swapping out the ribbon cable. If you've seen how it's routed; it folds over on itself 3 times plus some other bends and loops. I'm wondering if it just "cracked" somewhere with all the monkeying around my big paws did during the swap.

I'll try that one next. But please, if anyone has experienced the problem, I'd love to hear what you found out.

Thanks again,

Don

[dreammstr6]

or could be like the last one i worked on the drive just gave up. had to replace with another.

[D-Money]

Can it read from the floppy if you have the FD and HD connected to the onboard controller, WITHOUT the add-in card plugged in?

If you look around on-line you should have no problems finding a copy of the manual for your motherboard, which will show you which pin-groups are for the serial/parallel ports, even though they should be clearly labeled on the motherboard anyway.