On board IDE FD connector is missing pins, options?

[shepherdofchaos]

Here's the situation. I bought a used MSI K7A PRO motherboard for a good price, only to discover that the FD connector on board had some pins broken off. I know I could just disable the IDE controller on the board, and buy an IDE controller card for a PCI slot. The thing is I don't want to spend much money, but I do want to keep ATA66 for my ATA66 harddrive. Is it possible to have two IDE controllers running? The ATA66 on board for the HD, and an old cheap one for the floppy on a card?

 

[Noriaki]

<< Is it possible to have two IDE controllers running? >>

Yes...

But a Floppy Drive isn't IDE...it's 36pin not 40, and a totally difference interface. The cables look kinda similar, but they aren't the same.

And how many pins are broken off?
There is 1 or 2 that aren't used....sometimes they just aren't even included.

 

[MGMorden]

Actually if he's talking about the IDE connector and not the floppy (not sure which one he means) then almost all of those have at least one pin missing. A lot of the cables don't even have a slot for a pin in that locations so if you try and plug it into a board that does have that pin you screw things up.

If the connector is trully messed up though then yes, you can add an external card like a promise and disable the onboard controller. Just set the primary boot device to SCSI and it'll boot the hard drive conected to the promise. I've got a friend booting his machine of an Ultra66 b/c the onboard controllers on his A7A266 aren't compatible with his hard drive.

 

[shepherdofchaos]

3 pins towards one end. Swapped out cables and drives, so it's definitely the connector on board. Also, 2 adjacent pins were badly bent, making for a pretty clear picture.

So can you find a floppy drive controller card for a PCI slot?

 

[shepherdofchaos]

It's the floppy connector on the motherboard. This is a new system. I gotta have the floppy to get the CDROM up, to get the operating system up...etc. The best solution for me is I get the floppy to run off of a really cheap controller card (but it's gotta be PCI cuz' that's all I got ).

 

[Apuleus]

Well, if the motherboard is new then return it. Unless you broke the pins. Secondly obtain a bootable cd. I have several running around and work really well. Boots right in to dos just the way floppy does.

-Apuleus

 

[shepherdofchaos]

Yea. Someone on another board just informed me that W98 SE should be CD bootable. That will help, but I still gotta figure a way to have a working floppy. Can you even get a floppy controller on a card any more?

 

[Noriaki]

Yeah 3 pins at one end crushed, and more bent isn't so good....

Wow a floppy controller....I dunno...

I haven't seen one of those since my 486...You can IDE controllers because they are always upgrading IDE spec so Promise and others release IDE controllers to upgrade older boards.

But the floppy spec hasn't changed since the 486 days if not eariler...
Every board since about Pentium 100s and many before had them integrated...and it hasn't changed....so there's not really much of a market for them

I'm sure you could find one.....I'll see what I can do for you...


Alternatively you could get an LS120 &quot;Super&quot; disk drive.
They are IDE interface, and support 120MB Super disks and 1.44mb floppy disks...
They also have LS240 for 240MB super disks, I'm sure those also work with floppys.

Then you can use the drive for other stuff that's bigger than 1.44MB, and also have a floppy drive and not worry about the broken pins....

 

[HansXP]

I would try to return the board...if that doesn't work, buy an LS120/LS240 drive. They work great with floppies and even read them 3 times faster than regular floppy drives do.

 

[MGMorden]

I was just about to say to grab an LS-120 drive myself. They do make PCI cards that have all your stuff on it (basically cards with 2 IDE's, 1 floppy, 2 serials, and 1 parallel port), but those are VERY outdated. Just pick up an LS-120 which is a cool little floppy that plugs into your IDE port instead of the floppy port (I've got one and don't even have any of the LS120 disks . . . I just like the electric eject on the thing ).

 

[HappyPuppy]

If the only reason you need a floppy drive is to get the OS installed, you can fdisk and format the drive on another machine, copy the setup files from the CD to the HDD, re-install in the current machine and run setup.