floppy drive turmoil

Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive in my PC, as I mentioned in
this group. The hard drive is working fine.
However, yesterday I wanted to read a floppy disk... but the floppy drive
seemed stone dead. In Windows explorer kept telling me to insert media but
the floppy disk was in alright. Tried another floppy disk and still no media
was found.
Took a look at Windows - system - devices and there it was: Drive A, no
explanation mark or nothing out of order. Looked under properties and it
said the device is working properly. (!)
Today I opened the case and had a look inside. It seems I had forgotten to
reconnect the power cable of the floppy drive after the hard disk repair
job. After connecting everything works OK again.
I'm very surprised though that Windows didn't give any clue that there ws
something wrong with drive A...



--


|\ /|
| \/ |@rk
\../
\/os

On 03/25/2017 07:56 AM, Linea Recta wrote:
Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive in my PC, as I mentioned
in this group. The hard drive is working fine.
However, yesterday I wanted to read a floppy disk... but the floppy
drive seemed stone dead. In Windows explorer kept telling me to insert
media but the floppy disk was in alright. Tried another floppy disk and
still no media was found.
Took a look at Windows - system - devices and there it was: Drive A, no
explanation mark or nothing out of order. Looked under properties and it
said the device is working properly. (!)
Today I opened the case and had a look inside. It seems I had forgotten
to reconnect the power cable of the floppy drive after the hard disk
repair job. After connecting everything works OK again.
I'm very surprised though that Windows didn't give any clue that there
ws something wrong with drive A...






Probably looking no further than the BIOS.

I bet the same happens with older versions of Windows too...
I am sure I've seen that back in the Win9x days

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 13:56:59 +0100, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive in my PC, as I mentioned in
this group. The hard drive is working fine.
However, yesterday I wanted to read a floppy disk... but the floppy drive
seemed stone dead. In Windows explorer kept telling me to insert media but
the floppy disk was in alright. Tried another floppy disk and still no media
was found.
Took a look at Windows - system - devices and there it was: Drive A, no
explanation mark or nothing out of order. Looked under properties and it
said the device is working properly. (!)
Today I opened the case and had a look inside. It seems I had forgotten to
reconnect the power cable of the floppy drive after the hard disk repair
job. After connecting everything works OK again.
I'm very surprised though that Windows didn't give any clue that there ws
something wrong with drive A...

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/misc_tools_e.html

Device cleanup will remove references to hardware that is not
present. Use it very carefully. It removed a ton of stuff from my PC,
sound cards and monitors that died years ago and all USB devices that
were not plugged in..
It probably would have removed the reference to A: and you
would have to reinstall the drivers when you plugged the drive back
in.
OTOH, floppy drives might be blacklisted. Can't test.

I made images of all my floppies ages ago with Winimage, all
600+ of them, and burned them to CDRoms. You can mount the images, or
even open them with 7-Zip (or Winimage) if you need any data. Keeping
data on old floppy disks is risky.
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012

"Shadow" schreef in bericht
...
On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 13:56:59 +0100, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive in my PC, as I mentioned in
this group. The hard drive is working fine.
However, yesterday I wanted to read a floppy disk... but the floppy drive
seemed stone dead. In Windows explorer kept telling me to insert media but
the floppy disk was in alright. Tried another floppy disk and still no
media
was found.
Took a look at Windows - system - devices and there it was: Drive A, no
explanation mark or nothing out of order. Looked under properties and it
said the device is working properly. (!)
Today I opened the case and had a look inside. It seems I had forgotten to
reconnect the power cable of the floppy drive after the hard disk repair
job. After connecting everything works OK again.
I'm very surprised though that Windows didn't give any clue that there ws
something wrong with drive A...

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/misc_tools_e.html

Device cleanup will remove references to hardware that is not
present. Use it very carefully. It removed a ton of stuff from my PC,
sound cards and monitors that died years ago and all USB devices that
were not plugged in..
It probably would have removed the reference to A: and you
would have to reinstall the drivers when you plugged the drive back
in.
OTOH, floppy drives might be blacklisted. Can't test.

I made images of all my floppies ages ago with Winimage, all
600+ of them, and burned them to CDRoms. You can mount the images, or
even open them with 7-Zip (or Winimage) if you need any data. Keeping
data on old floppy disks is risky.
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012





I don't use the floppy drive very often, but I want to have everything in
working order anyhow. Besides, it may come in handy if I ever need to boot
from external media if I have trouble with the DVD drive...


--


|\ /|
| \/ |@rk
\../
\/os

In article ,
says...

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 13:56:59 +0100, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive in my PC, as I mentioned in
this group. The hard drive is working fine.
However, yesterday I wanted to read a floppy disk... but the floppy drive
seemed stone dead. In Windows explorer kept telling me to insert media but
the floppy disk was in alright. Tried another floppy disk and still no media
was found.
Took a look at Windows - system - devices and there it was: Drive A, no
explanation mark or nothing out of order. Looked under properties and it
said the device is working properly. (!)
Today I opened the case and had a look inside. It seems I had forgotten to
reconnect the power cable of the floppy drive after the hard disk repair
job. After connecting everything works OK again.
I'm very surprised though that Windows didn't give any clue that there ws
something wrong with drive A...

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/misc_tools_e.html

Device cleanup will remove references to hardware that is not
present. Use it very carefully. It removed a ton of stuff from my PC,
sound cards and monitors that died years ago and all USB devices that
were not plugged in..
It probably would have removed the reference to A: and you
would have to reinstall the drivers when you plugged the drive back
in.
OTOH, floppy drives might be blacklisted. Can't test.

I made images of all my floppies ages ago with Winimage, all
600+ of them, and burned them to CDRoms. You can mount the images, or
even open them with 7-Zip (or Winimage) if you need any data. Keeping
data on old floppy disks is risky.
[]'s

My old floppies are all stored in a box under the basement stairs. Few
thousand at least. None of it is worth even attempting to read anymore,
all over 20 years old. Most disks won't even format properly and the few
that do can't be trusted anyway. I'm unsure if buying new floppies would
improve that but why bother when dvd's can be had for $0.30 a disk
bought in bulk. Anything of value got copied and burned onto cd/dvd's
years ago now. As an aside, never did trust the decent valued tape
backup I have or even those "ZIP" drives from years ago now.

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:00:14 -0300, pjp
wrote:


My old floppies are all stored in a box under the basement stairs. Few
thousand at least. None of it is worth even attempting to read anymore,
all over 20 years old. Most disks won't even format properly and the few
that do can't be trusted anyway.


My last computer had a floppy drive that I insisted the builder
install in it. I had it for about five years and never used it, not
even once. So my current computer doesn't have a floppy drive, and I
threw out all my old floppies.



I'm unsure if buying new floppies would
improve that but why bother when dvd's can be had for $0.30 a disk
bought in bulk.


Even less--about $.20 each.



Anything of value got copied and burned onto cd/dvd's
years ago now.


Same here.

Linea Recta wrote:
Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive in my PC, as I mentioned
in this group. The hard drive is working fine.
However, yesterday I wanted to read a floppy disk... but the floppy
drive seemed stone dead. In Windows explorer kept telling me to insert
media but the floppy disk was in alright. Tried another floppy disk and
still no media was found.
Took a look at Windows - system - devices and there it was: Drive A, no
explanation mark or nothing out of order. Looked under properties and it
said the device is working properly. (!)
Today I opened the case and had a look inside. It seems I had forgotten
to reconnect the power cable of the floppy drive after the hard disk
repair job. After connecting everything works OK again.
I'm very surprised though that Windows didn't give any clue that there
ws something wrong with drive A...

Floppy drives are "dumb" devices and don't have PNP
(Plug And Play) information.

The controller (logic block in the SuperI/O) on the
other hand, does have PNP. If you switch on the floppy
in the BIOS, when Windows boots, it "sees" the SuperI/O
logic block. But it cannot determine anything about
the floppy drive on the cable at that point.

CPU
|
|
SuperI/O ---- floppy cable ------ floppy_drive
(dumb device)

There are a couple flavors of drives. The Macintosh drives
had motorized eject, and they also seemed to have "Media Presence"
detect. (The inserted floppy pressed on a microswitch ot
something like that.) Windows floppies don't have motorized
eject, and maybe the first realization no media is present,
comes when the controller logic block goes to do a read,
and no transitions on /RDATA are seen. And then the notification
box "No Media" appears, which covers both actual no media being
in the drive, as well as, say, the head being ripped off the
arm of the drive.

But other than that, the floppy drive doesn't have a processor.
There is no "clever communication" between the floppy
and the SuperI/O. Unlike a SATA drive, where there is a processor
in the SATA drive, and packets travel over the data cable
as a communications path. The floppy just has a bunch of
mechanical control signals like Motor Enable, Step, Head Select.

Drive "A" appears in Windows, as soon as the SuperI/O logic
block is enabled in the BIOS. And I don't know if there is
an encoding in the registers there somewhere, indicating
how many drives are supported. There was some crazy scheme
at one point, to support up to four floppy drives. But I
don't remember the details. It's expected the user
will recognize their computer case has no floppy drive,
and program the BIOS logic block setting appropriately
(disable the SuperI/O FDC if no drives are equipped in the
computer case).

*******

If you rotate the floppy controller cable 180 degrees and
plug it in, the LED on the floppy drive should remain
asserted. And that would be a clue you screwed up. It
the power cable was disconnected, there would be a
pronounced lack of clicking, whirring, and LED flashing.

Paul

"Paul" schreef in bericht
news
Linea Recta wrote:
Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive in my PC, as I mentioned in
this group. The hard drive is working fine.
However, yesterday I wanted to read a floppy disk... but the floppy drive
seemed stone dead. In Windows explorer kept telling me to insert media
but the floppy disk was in alright. Tried another floppy disk and still
no media was found.
Took a look at Windows - system - devices and there it was: Drive A, no
explanation mark or nothing out of order. Looked under properties and it
said the device is working properly. (!)
Today I opened the case and had a look inside. It seems I had forgotten
to reconnect the power cable of the floppy drive after the hard disk
repair job. After connecting everything works OK again.
I'm very surprised though that Windows didn't give any clue that there ws
something wrong with drive A...

Floppy drives are "dumb" devices and don't have PNP
(Plug And Play) information.

The controller (logic block in the SuperI/O) on the
other hand, does have PNP. If you switch on the floppy
in the BIOS, when Windows boots, it "sees" the SuperI/O
logic block. But it cannot determine anything about
the floppy drive on the cable at that point.

CPU
|
|
SuperI/O ---- floppy cable ------ floppy_drive
(dumb device)

There are a couple flavors of drives. The Macintosh drives
had motorized eject, and they also seemed to have "Media Presence"
detect. (The inserted floppy pressed on a microswitch ot
something like that.) Windows floppies don't have motorized
eject, and maybe the first realization no media is present,
comes when the controller logic block goes to do a read,
and no transitions on /RDATA are seen. And then the notification
box "No Media" appears, which covers both actual no media being
in the drive, as well as, say, the head being ripped off the
arm of the drive.

But other than that, the floppy drive doesn't have a processor.
There is no "clever communication" between the floppy
and the SuperI/O. Unlike a SATA drive, where there is a processor
in the SATA drive, and packets travel over the data cable
as a communications path. The floppy just has a bunch of
mechanical control signals like Motor Enable, Step, Head Select.

Drive "A" appears in Windows, as soon as the SuperI/O logic
block is enabled in the BIOS. And I don't know if there is
an encoding in the registers there somewhere, indicating
how many drives are supported. There was some crazy scheme
at one point, to support up to four floppy drives. But I
don't remember the details. It's expected the user
will recognize their computer case has no floppy drive,
and program the BIOS logic block setting appropriately
(disable the SuperI/O FDC if no drives are equipped in the
computer case).

*******

If you rotate the floppy controller cable 180 degrees and
plug it in, the LED on the floppy drive should remain
asserted. And that would be a clue you screwed up. It
the power cable was disconnected, there would be a
pronounced lack of clicking, whirring, and LED flashing.

Paul



Thanks for your expert background information.
You're right: I missed the clicking sounds yesterday, but now all is OK
again.
As you can see, I don't use the floppy drive very often. I didn't notice it
disfunctioning from 6-1-2017 until yesterday...



--


|\ /|
| \/ |@rk
\../
\/os

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 13:56:59 +0100
"Linea Recta" wrote:

From: "Linea Recta"
Subject: floppy drive turmoil
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2017 13:56:59 +0100
Newsgroups: alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.stor age
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Windows Mail 6.0.6002.18197

Some time ago I mounted a new SATA hard drive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sildenafil

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 18:32:36 +0100, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

As you can see, I don't use the floppy drive very often. I didn't notice it
disfunctioning from 6-1-2017 until yesterday...

I read that date as June 1, 2017, and thought it was odd before
realizing it's really January 6, 2017. :-)

--

Char Jackson

In article ,
says...

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:00:14 -0300, pjp
wrote:


My old floppies are all stored in a box under the basement stairs. Few
thousand at least. None of it is worth even attempting to read anymore,
all over 20 years old. Most disks won't even format properly and the few
that do can't be trusted anyway.


My last computer had a floppy drive that I insisted the builder
install in it. I had it for about five years and never used it, not
even once. So my current computer doesn't have a floppy drive, and I
threw out all my old floppies.



I'm unsure if buying new floppies would
improve that but why bother when dvd's can be had for $0.30 a disk
bought in bulk.


Even less--about $.20 each.



Anything of value got copied and burned onto cd/dvd's
years ago now.


Same here.

Canada, when not on sale low $30's for 100 stack.

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 16:32:09 -0300, pjp
wrote:

In article ,
says...

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:00:14 -0300, pjp
wrote:


My old floppies are all stored in a box under the basement stairs. Few
thousand at least. None of it is worth even attempting to read anymore,
all over 20 years old. Most disks won't even format properly and the few
that do can't be trusted anyway.


My last computer had a floppy drive that I insisted the builder
install in it. I had it for about five years and never used it, not
even once. So my current computer doesn't have a floppy drive, and I
threw out all my old floppies.



I'm unsure if buying new floppies would
improve that but why bother when dvd's can be had for $0.30 a disk
bought in bulk.


Even less--about $.20 each.



Anything of value got copied and burned onto cd/dvd's
years ago now.


Same here.

Canada, when not on sale low $30's for 100 stack.


I know nothing about Canadian prices. Amazon has several brands for
around $20 a hundred.

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 14:04:07 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 18:32:36 +0100, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

As you can see, I don't use the floppy drive very often. I didn't notice it
disfunctioning from 6-1-2017 until yesterday...

I read that date as June 1, 2017, and thought it was odd before
realizing it's really January 6, 2017. :-)


I don't like either method of formatting dates. As far as I'm
concerned, it should be Y-M-D, since that's sortable.

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:51:48 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 14:04:07 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 18:32:36 +0100, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

As you can see, I don't use the floppy drive very often. I didn't notice it
disfunctioning from 6-1-2017 until yesterday...

I read that date as June 1, 2017, and thought it was odd before
realizing it's really January 6, 2017. :-)


I don't like either method of formatting dates. As far as I'm
concerned, it should be Y-M-D, since that's sortable.

+1
That's what I use for all my backups.
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:51:48 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 14:04:07 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Mar 2017 18:32:36 +0100, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

As you can see, I don't use the floppy drive very often. I didn't notice it
disfunctioning from 6-1-2017 until yesterday...

I read that date as June 1, 2017, and thought it was odd before
realizing it's really January 6, 2017. :-)


I don't like either method of formatting dates. As far as I'm
concerned, it should be Y-M-D, since that's sortable.

+1