Floppy Drive Not Found After Adding Sound Card

[mbru]

I got the floppy drive not found error (40) while putting together a system and would appreciate any ideas to resolve the problem. The mainboard is an Epox MVPC32 with a K6-2 475+ set at 5 x 100. The system BIOS recognized the CPU as a K6-2+ and correctly identified the speed setting (500 @ 5 x 100). The board and CPU booted to DOS fine from a floppy, with the only card installed being a PCI video card. I installed Win98, successfully, I think -- it hung a few times in the installation process but eventually completed. The computer booted to Win98 fine from the hard drive. I then changed the video card to an AGP Diamond Speedstar A200, rebooted and installed the video drivers. The system continued operating fine with the new video card.

At that point, I added a Sonic Impact S100 PCI sound card. On booting, the Floppy Drive Not Found error 40 appeared. When I just did "continue", the system seemed to work fine, but without a floppy drive.

I tested with a different floppy drive. Same result. I removed the sound card and rebooted -- no error, floppy drive recognized and functional. There are no jumpers on the sound card to change IRQ or DMA settings. I imagine there is something set wrong in the BIOS, but I don't know what it is.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[edfair]

First instinct is loose cable on M/B end that got jiggled when you were doing sound card stuff. Activate floppy seek on boot in bios to see if POST finds it. Sound cards are bad about grabbing IRQs, but I can't ever recall one grabbing th f loppy. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[blubeast]

The IRQ for the floppy is about the only one that I've never seen grabbed by another component, however this sounds like what is occuring, as you have no jumpers then the only choices are either in the bios, or force the sound card to accept another IRQ (control panel/system/device manager/sound card/properties/resources)uncheck the auto configure feature and enter the vaules you need, remember to check for conflicts.

 

[TekKnowGeek]

I agree with blubeast. Definitely sounds like an IRQ steering problem.
Most older boards don't support bus mastering on all PCI devices, but this board does. In order to utilize this technology your audio card drivers must support dynamic resource assignment. In device manager, check out the IRQ value for the Sonic Impact S100 PCI card. I'll bet it's low ~6. Try to manually configure the IRQ for the card by finding another free IRQ in the pool of available values. IRQ 6 is usually owned by the FDD controller.