[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Installing an external floppy drive

sal@basp.nmpcad.se (Soren Altemark) (08/13/89)

I have problems adding a third floppy drive to my 386 AT system.
Besides the 5 1/4" 1.2 Mb and 3 1/2" 1.44 Mb drives, installed as A:
and B:, I would like to install a third 5 1/4" 360Kb drive. The A: and
B: drives are attached to a DTC (Data Technology Corp.) 5280CRA HD and
FD controller, supporting 2 floppy drives. For the third floppy drive
I have installed a separate controller card (Noname Taiwanese) set up
as seondary card (I/O addresses 370H-377H). My system runs MS-DOS 4.01
and Phoenix 386 BIOS 1.1.13.

My first idea was that installing the DRIVER.SYS driver, addressing
the external floppy drive as /d:2, should be sufficient to make it
work. But it didn't. I keep getting the message "Seek error..", trying
to access the external drive.

Do I have to use special driver to support my configuration? If so, is
there any available in the Public Domain? Is there any other solution
to my problem?
--
Soren Altemark, Base/OPEN Development
Swedish Institute of Microelectronics, IM
PO Box 1084, S-164 21 KISTA, SWEDEN

JLI@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (08/14/89)

In article <1989Aug12.200213.14962@sics.se>, sal@basp.nmpcad.se (Soren Altemark) writes:
> I have problems adding a third floppy drive to my 386 AT system.
> Besides the 5 1/4" 1.2 Mb and 3 1/2" 1.44 Mb drives, installed as A:
> and B:, I would like to install a third 5 1/4" 360Kb drive. The A: and
> B: drives are attached to a DTC (Data Technology Corp.) 5280CRA HD and
> FD controller, supporting 2 floppy drives. For the third floppy drive
> I have installed a separate controller card (Noname Taiwanese) set up
> as seondary card (I/O addresses 370H-377H). My system runs MS-DOS 4.01
> and Phoenix 386 BIOS 1.1.13.

  The problem could be with the DTC controller.  We had the same problem
before.  We were using the CompatiCard to install two more floppy drives.
We could not make them to work even though there was floppy driver
provided.  We finally replaced the DTC controller (5280 CRA) with a
WD1003 MM2, and it worked fine.  
  We also tried some other DTC 5280 controllers (CRZ or something, I
forgot), some of them worked with CompatiCard.  After looking at the
DTC controller more closely, it seemed to me that the DTC controller
was designed to handle more than two floppy drives (some chips were
not on the board).  I suspect that the secondary I/O address may already
used by the controller.
> 
> My first idea was that installing the DRIVER.SYS driver, addressing
> the external floppy drive as /d:2, should be sufficient to make it
> work. But it didn't. I keep getting the message "Seek error..", trying
> to access the external drive.
> 
> Do I have to use special driver to support my configuration? If so, is
> there any available in the Public Domain? Is there any other solution
> to my problem?
> --

  You may wish to contact DTC tech support to make sure the secondary
I/O address is not occupied. The suffix of the controller model (CRA,
CRZ or whatever) may have something to do with how the board is 
configured.

Qiwu Liu
U of KS