Old 386 reading A drive as B drive

[comnetlimited]

Its pretty Old machine but I like it.
Now my A drive is not working but B drive is working i.e. reading floppy disk.
I want to boot into B drive but I cannot.. it goes directly to c: drive.

I check the CMOS and XCMOS so sequence to boot up but I couldn't find it.

Please help...

 

[dakota81]

BIOS's didn't allow booting from the B: drive. Newer motherboards and BIOS's allow you to swap the A: and B: from the BIOS setup, but your board is way too old for that.

The only thing is to open up the machine and there is one cable coming from the motherboard and connecting to both floppy drives. Unplug the cable from the floppy drives (noting which direction the red strip is on the cable before unplugging) and swap which drive is hooked up to which connector. Then you can re-setup the drives in the BIOS setup and boot from the good drive.

 

[comnetlimited]

Thank you dakota81, but I have only one floppy drive and I have a card which the hard-drive cable and the floppy drive cable connected to slots on the card and the card is sloted into the mother board. Previously it was reading A drive but when I sloted the card to another slot on the on the motherboard (because of troubleshooting a problem with HDD not detecting)....
I'll change the card's slot again and let you know...

marsh

 

[edfair]

Older operating systems gave the drive the capability of being a: or B:, both designations tied into the drive at the end of the cable. Hardware limited the boot to the a: designated drive.
Would normally suggest that the I/O card was failing to pass something thru but since the hard drive is working it seems less likely. You may have some corrosion on the headers that pass the drive select signal through. Try reseating the connectors on both ends of the ribbon cable a couple of times to see if that helps.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[franklin97355]

comnetlimited: Not the card but the cable plugged into the floppy itself. The connector determines which drive the device is detected as. Thats what the twist in the cable is there for.

 

[docdebit]

A remote alternative to the cable position on the floppy drive end.

Did you completely disconnect the cable at the floppy drive end? And if so, does your floppy drive have two different connectors? And if so, did you reconnect in the right spot?

I had a radio shack floppy once that literally had two separate connectors on the back, you used one if you wanted it to be drive a and the other if you wanted it to be drive b.

good luck
drdebit

 

[mainegeek]

Also, check the I/O cards jumpers. You may have accidently knocked one off when you moved the card from one slot to another. In the bios make sure 1.44 floppy is assigned to A: and not B:

 

[micker377]

Fry's Electronics sells new 3 1/2 floppy drives for $9.00. Save all the "work arounds" and headaches!