dual floppy drives, windows 98se, i dont know what else to do

[bagaki]

I just built a machine and it uses dual 1.44MB floppies. I have a 40GB HDD partitioned with win98se, win2k, and a third drive for storage. I have the following installed: AthlonXP 1600+, 256MB DDR266, 40GB HDD, ATI 7000 AGP, cdrom, cdrw, onboard audio, pci nic, pci modem, pci pcmcia reader interface card, pci parallel card with 2 ports.

under windows 2000 everything works flawless. Under win98se the floppy drives will not read. they are visible and will access the disk, but will lock the computer when they do. I have tried disabling everything. the only time the drives work is in safe mode. What could conflict with the drives that would not be loaded in safe mode? i know this is a windows 98 problem and not hardware as confirmed in win2k. I have also tried uninstalling the floppy controller and re-installing via windows, with no luck. This is really frustrating, can anyone help?

thanks

bagaki

 

[Pink0]

10/17/2002 8:22 PM (NEW!)



I just built a machine and it uses dual 1.44MB floppies.

I don't have an answer for your problem but I would like to know why on earth you have two floppy drives. If it's for copying floppies you can copy them to ram first then to the other disc. It doesn't save any time having two drives since on the floppy channel only one drive can be accessed at a time. You'll see drive 1 read drive 2 write etc. not at the same time. That's just nuts.

 

[bagaki]

i kinda figured i would get this question. it is for a client, it is what they requested. I have built them 5 machines now with dual floppies and all work fine.

 

[Pink0]

I suppose that's a reasonable explanation. I'm prepared to accept it
Since the drives work in safe mode and in windows 2000 I'm not sure what could be causing it. What I would recommend doing is removing the ENUM keys. It's been a while since I used windows 98 but they were something like:
SCSI
FLOP
ISA/PNP
and...umm....4 others. I wish I had a win 98 box and I could tell you.
That's in hkeylocalmachine, Hardware (I think), and then enum. That or just hkeylocal and then enum
You'd be surprised at the problems it's been known to clean up.

 

[bagaki]

thanks for the reply, i will give it a try. i was wondering if that does not work, does anyone else have any ideas (i have to travel to work on it, so i would like a few options to try if any fail.)

thanks much

bagaki

 

[Pink0]

sorry, there are 5 enum keys that you would want to remove...NOT PCI. In this case don't touch that one. Ummm....so we have....
SCSI
FLOP
ISA/PNP
ESDI (just remembered)

And something else. It's completely stuck in my brain. Argh!

 

[Markfw]

It sounds like an IRQ problem of sime type. The floppies are on IRQ6 (I think). There may be some device on that IRQ by mistake. By deleting the keys mentioned, I think the computer re-detects all of the hardware, and this should fix the problem.

 

[KF]

Here's some things:

Windows 98 used to have some drivers for tape drives that worked on the floppy controller which would auto-load and auto-dectect tape drives on boot up. This has given me problems. I think it is supposed to be fixed with later Windows98 versions or a patch. Deleting them got rid of the problems. (in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS) Unfortunately I deleted them so I can't find the names in my current Win98se setup. This I found elsewhere:
drvwq117.vxd
drvwppqt.vxd

I think there is a third that also begins drv.... It doesn't hurt to delete a lot of this junk because practially no one has it and it just wastes boot up time. If you move it instead, move it to a directory totally out of the WINDOWS directory so Windows doesn't find it.

There is a setting in System Properties/Performance/File System/Floppy Disk/ that you can turn on and off. Who knows? This is said to be for external floppies that may or may not be connected.

 

[woodie1]

nm

 

[bagaki]

Originally posted by: woodie1
nm

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