kramer@WITTENBERG.EDU ("Mike Andrews") (05/02/91)
I need some advice on a strange problem I'm having with my 1.44meg Toshiba
floppy drive.. Occasionally when switching floppies, the drive will suddenly
quit reading anything, and gives "General Failure reading drive B" errors
for everything. Rebooting the machine causes the BIOS to print "Diskette
drive types mismatch - run setup", and when I run the setup, the drive types
are shown to be correct. Resaving the setup anyway and rebooting cures the
problem and causes the drive to read disks again, for a while. After about
4 or 5 disks though, it quits again. It seems to happen most often when
the new disk is a 1.44M disk, but it's happened with 720K's too..
Norton 5.0 SysInfo says the BIOS date is 11/15/85, and it identifies itself
as Award 286 BIOS v3.03 on startup. My guess is that the problem is in the
BIOS and not in the drive, since the drive has done this for a long time,
and the BIOS date is rather old. I'm pretty sure it's not the controller
card, as this is the third disk controller I've tested it on.
Can anyone recommend a good place to get a set of Phoenix 3.10 BIOS chips
(or AMI) cheap? I've seen ads for $70 for a set, but I was hoping for
cheaper... Or if you don't think it's the BIOS, what do you think it
could be?
Email replies please.. I'll summarize to the net if there's enough interest.
Thanks for your help.
Mike
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Mike Andrews Springfield, OH | A (by)product of the heart of the Bluegrass
Bitnet: kramer@wittenbg.bitnet | Rush: "Tough times demand tough talk demand
Internet: kramer@wittenberg.edu | tough hearts demand tough songs demand...."