FD not accessible in WinME

[RICHINMINN]

Here's a new system I just built:
Soyo Dragon Plus motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU
Volcano 5 Heatsink/Fan
1 GB PC2100 DDR Memory
100 GB Western Digital HD
Yamaha 20x/10x/40x CD-R/RW
Liteon 16x DVD-ROM
NEC 1.44 MB FD
ATX case w/upgraded Antec 400-watt power supply
Windows ME (problem also present with Win98SE)

The FD is configured as a regular A: drive in the BIOS, and the system can boot from it without any problems. But when I boot into Windows, the drive is inaccessible, timing out any time that I try to read from it or write to it. A further complication is that when I downloaded the Data Lifeguard utility from WDC, and executed it to create a bootable diskette for HD diagnostic purposes, it worked! (It evidently is working at a lower level than Windows.)

I've replaced the floppy drive and cable, several times (using both new components and components from currently-working systems). I've deleted the FD from the Windows configuration, and let Windows redetect it, but that didn't fix anything. I've tried running with 256 MB, 512 MB, 768 MB, and 1 GB of memory. I originally had Win98SE on the system, and the problem existed there too.

Any clues as to what is going on? I would like to resolve this without reinstalling Windows, if possible.

Thanks for your help!

RICHINMINN

 

[Joelee]

I found an interesting article pertaining to your problem... here is an excerpt:

If the floppy disk drive formats properly in MS-DOS however does not format in Windows it is likely that Windows or a program within Windows is preventing the floppy drive from working. Attempt to End task all running TSRs. If you continue to experience the same issues we recommend that Windows be reinstalled.

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/chtsr.htm

This link is a document explaining TSRs and how to shut them down.

Hope this helps
Joelee

 

[RICHINMINN]

To anyone who may be interested:
The cause of my FD problem was the presence of an add-on LPT2 card, installed in a PCI slot. The COMx, LPTx, and FD components are still considered ISA functions, even though the motherboard may not even have any ISA slots. This "translation" of ISA functions into PCI functions is supposed to be taken care of by the "ISA-to-PCI bridge" portion of the VIA 4in1 set of drivers. But some versions of this VIA driver don't translate very well. The presence of the LPT2 card hosed up Windows' ability to deal with ANY ISA functions, which made the FD inaccessible. (And that also explains why I was able to access the FD as a bootup device, since Windows wasn't loaded at that point.)

I removed the LPT2 card, and the FD is working fine.

 

[ceh4702]

I've seen newer motherboards have problems with finding the Floppy and getting it to work before. It is probably because windows oper system doesnt recognize all the new components in a motherboard. They can boot up so fast. I wonder if Windows can see everything. Lots of motherboards have patches to make Windows see the Floppy and other devices.

Some BIOS have multiple locations in the BIOS to identify and set up the Floppy dirve. One trick I tried is making windows do a check on the floppy instead of booting up fast. I was still having trouble with my Asus A7V266-E Motherboard while I was trying to set it up last night. Beats me what I did to make it work right. It would try to read the floppy and just quit like it was a bad disk. I only had the Hard Drive Video card floppy and CDROM hooked up no extra cards for anything else, and none of the on-board integrated sound was enabled. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.