Win XP Pro Reverses Drives A & B - Why?

[corkyg]

I've never run into this problem before, but I just installed XP Pro and find that it reverses my A and B drives, and the drive manager does not allow changes in that area.

Apparently XP Pro has over ridden the BIOS . . . I have a regular floppy installed there . . . it is bootable and has always been "A".

I also have a LS-120 drive installed (IDE Secondary, Master) which has always been "B" in 98, 98SE, and ME. Now XP decides that it should be "A" and the boot floppy should be "B." It doesn't hurt anything, but it sure is confusing now and then. Anyone know of a reason for this or a way to change it?

 

[BlackAspic]

try manually removing the LS120 drive. windows will then reboot and redetect the drive, and will probably give it B:

i have no idea why windows did that in the first place.

 

[corkyg]

That's worth a try. I can just open the case and pull the power connection on it. We'll see what happens. It doesn't really hurt anything because before XP loads, the boot drive is the regular FDC floppy, and the LS-120 shows only like the hard drives and DVD. But as soon as XP loads, it reverses A and B. The only effect it has is I have to re-train myself to download things to "A" instead of "B".

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[corkyg]

Well, I disconnected the LS-120 drive and booted to XP Pro. Went to My Computer and all it did was eliminate the "A" drive. The FDC floppy remains as "B."

Looks like this is simply a bug in XP. Will report it to M$.

 

[Saltin]

If you look at the floppy cable inside the box, is the little twist in it closer to the drive or closer to the mobo? And how are the rest of your drives set up as fars as Primary, Secondary, Master and Slave?

 

[Kanuk]

There is more to this than a reversed cable connection. I have the same set up (A as floppy drive and B as LS120) and my A and B are reversed as well but this is with the home addition of XP, not pro. And as an added bonus, it created another floppy drive for me that doesn't exist. As the original poster said, it is not a big deal.....just a pain because I know it isn't right.

 

[corkyg]

Problem solved! First of all, there is nothing wrong with any cables . . . they have been running correctly with 98, 98SE and Me for a couple of years.

I decided to try and reinstall XP with the LS-120 (would be the same with a IDE Zip) disconnected. That did not work. The FDC drive still came up as "B."

So, I decided to start over. I recloned the drive back to the original state, and started a fresh XP Pro installation. But! This time I disconnected the LS-120 from the outset. This time it worked correctly. The FDC drive came up as "A." Then when the dust cleared, I powered down and reconnected the LS-120 drive. Success again! It showed up as "B" and is back to normal.

What we have here is apparently a bug in Microsoft's install program for XP Pro. BTW . . . it happened both with clean install and upgrade. I assume that no one at Microsoft considered that anyone would have a regular FDC floppy and a high capacity removable installed at the same time, and they wrote the install program accordingly.

All's well that ends well.

 

[SharkB8]

corky-g-
I have a similar setup with a regular floppy and an LS-120. I am moving to XP soon and will keep all this in mind. Thanks for doing all the research.