Tom,
It doesn't seem like you should be having so much trouble installing a
floppy in your computer. The important thing is that the ribbon cable have
pin 1 properly positioned on both the MB and the floppy drive. The "A:" drive
should be the last drive on the cable, after the twist. The error message
"not ready reading drive A" usually means that you tried to read drive A: but
did not have a floppy in the drive.
3.5" drives originally had some problems in that the "door closed" signal
(i.e., disk changed signal) did not always work properly. Typically that
manifested itself by repeating a DIRectory listing even when the disk was
changed. A CTRL-C would take care of that, however, putting DRIVPARM = /D:0
/C /F:7 (assuming the 3.5" drive is your A: drive) in your CONFIG.SYS would
permanently correct the problem.
I like to have my CMOS boot sequence set up to first look to drive A:, and
lastly to look to the HD for booting so that I can always boot to a floppy
without having to unplug the HD.
Roger Turk
Tucson, Arizona USA
Thomas Tabler wrote:
. > Dear Clarence and List:
. > Much to my surprise, even the floppy drives I sent away to
. > Phoenix didn't work! After rigorous testing, I felt one floppy
. > drive {TEAC} unit would be satisfactory, for it was working and
. > I was getting an "A" prompt. But after that comprehensive test,
. > It started failing with an "not ready reading drive A" report.
. > So I installed the other unit, all seems set up right, and again
. > and again I test it with a DOS utility and the message: Configuration
. > is incorrect". This is most exasperating, as I was forced to finally
. > disable the drive in order to get the computer to boot right.
