🚀 go-pugleaf

Need help from you PC (Compaq) and MSDOS Gurus out there...


Short story:

     I bought a 3.5 1.44M floppy for my system and can't get it to
     work.  The CMOS doesn't seem to recognise that drive type. I've
     tried using drivparm and driver.sys to redefine my drive, but
     it doesn't work -- when I try to tell it to do anything to
     drive b:, drive a:'s light comes on.  I can even format 
     in a:, but calling it b:.  During boot up, the 3.5's light
     does come on, so something is happening.

Somewhat longer story:

     In addition to the above, I'm hampered by the fact that I don't
     have a real diagnostics disk for my system.  The one I have seems
     to sort of work, but the 3.5 inch floppy won't pass the disks tests.
     This really doesn't worry me, as my second hard drive won't pass
     the disks tests, either, but works just fine.

     On another 3.5 I had yesterday I got the drive to actually format,
     but at the very end, it would say "Can't write BOOT" or something
     like that.  I could even read disks that had already been written
     and formatted -- but if I wrote to that disk, it was trashed.

     With this drive, as I said, DOS won't recognize it at all -- it
     just starts doing whatever with drive a:.  I can still run the tests,
     though (from diagnostics), and they get about halfway done before
     failing.

So, am I out of luck?  Just return it and resign myself to no 3.5 disk?
This system is a Compaq DeskPro 386/20 -- I don't know exactly how old,
as I bought it used, but the drive controller card says 1987.

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Sean.

---
Sean L. Gilley
sgilley@cbnewsl.cb.att.com  slg@cblpd.cb.att.com
slg2@cblph.cb.att.com       slg@sunray.att.com
614 236 5031 (h), 614 860 5743 (w)