P4I Fire Dragon: Floppy Won't Write under Win2k, OK under DOS and Win98 ... ?

Hi All.

Wondering if anyone can lend some insight ...

I built a P4I Fire Dragon running Win2k around 18 months ago, and at
the time the floppy drive worked OK.

Since then, I've done a few mods to the machine ... IIRC, a
USB/FireWire card, wired the internal FireWire to the front "panel",
and added a 200GB hard disk as the slave on the first IDE
channel/pair. I hardly ever used the floppy during this whole time.

Well, now the floppy won't write (but it will read just fine). Any
write causes an I/O error, after which the floppy won't even read
until I reboot.

I thought it was the cable, P/S or the floppy drive itself, and
swapped out all three, but the problem persisted. Then, in a moment of
inspiration, I booted from a Win98 floppy, and lo and behold, the
floppy drive reads and writes just fine. Same if booting from a DOS
floppy.

So, it appears I have some sort of driver or other software conflict.
I did a CMOS reset and a fail-safe config in the BIOS, but it made no
difference.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

--Andrew

 

Try removing the USB/Firewire card. Since the FireDragon has both already
that would be a good conflict right there. If you needed additional USB and
Firewire ports you should have purchased hubs for both.

 

All the ports work, but it's worth a try .. I'll report back ...

--Andrew

 

Bulls-eye!

Removed the IOGear GUF220 card and the floppy works fine.

Now I'll put it back and try to discern where the conflict is ...

Thanks,

--Andrew

 

Hi Jim.

Well, it appears that the IOGear GUF220 is what one might call a BAD
CARD ... and what's even more illuminating, the GUF220 doesn't even
show up on IOGear's website -- it appears to have been replaced by the
GUF320.

From what others have said online about the GUF220, it appears that
this card is probably not worth dealing with any more. It might also
explain some serious problems I was having with external FireWire
drives ...

FWIW, with or without the GUF220 installed, there were no conflicts of
any sort (I/O, DMA, IRQ, etc.). But its presence screwed up floppy
writes, and its absence enabled the flopy to work properly.

My P4I Fire Dragon has all peripheral enabled except for the on-board
RAID controller. AGP has a GeForce Ti 4200 (?) in it, and one PCI slot
has an Adaptec SCSI controller.

Thanks for suggesting the USB/FW card as the source of the problem.

--Andrew

 

Not a problem, the systems are ment to only have one firewire of usb
controller. If you deactivated onboard usb and firewire the card would most
likely work.