Hi,

I have not posted in a long time so forgive me if any of this is not
correctly posted.

I am in the process of upgrading some old IBM desktop boxes with 486 DX 33
and 66 processors. The units were donated to our school and we need them
for word processing and simple computing. The boxes now have 32 megs of
memory, Intel 486-DX2-66 or 33 processors, sound card, 500 meg hardrives,
48X cd rom, and of course a 3.5 floppy drive. The problem I am having with
the machines is that when I upgrade from W3.11 to W98 the floppy drive is
not functional in windows. In system properties the floppy drive is
recognized, it appears in explorer, however it will not read a disk. When
you try and access floppy "A", the activity light on the floppy goes on but
you get a message that says the floppy is not present etc. The floppy works
fine in dos when booting with a system disk. I fooled around with the dma,
irq, and memory range trying to mimic one lone IBM box that does work with
the floppy. I tried installing another floppy controller changing the
values of each so that I could duplicate the DMA 2, IRQ and memory range
and got the floppy to work. I tried deleting the extra floppy controller.
The floppy still works. I then reboot and W98 again recognizes the floppy
device and installs another floppy controller and the floppy ceases to
work. It shows up in Explorer but is not functional. I assume that since I
can make it work on occasion that the wiring and the drive are ok. Somehow
the default values for the floppy drive are incorrect and it is almost
impossible to change the values of the DMA, IRQ and memory range without a
conflict with another device. Even if I get it working by pure chance, upon
reboot it looses functionality.
It is perplexing  to say the least as we have about 24 machines that have
to be put in use. Does anyone have any suggestions and or a fix for this
problem? I guess someone else must be having the same problem with this
vintage box as they all exhibit the same anomaly. Sometimes there are flags
in system properties and sometimes not. I tried switching the parameters so
that there are no conflicts and more often than not it only works until a
reboot.
Thank you,
Michael Rubin
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http://www.netrox.net/~blackblt/
mailto:[log in to unmask]

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