IBM 5162 (XT/286) - Error 601 with Fixed Disk and Diskette Drive Adapter

[jakari]

I've been working on this PC XT/286 on and off for a few months (older thread linked below). Yesterday I got it far enough along to boot from floppy a few times - the SETUP utility, a couple DOS versions. Great.

I reconnected the hard disk and reran Setup. Type 2 HDD, no problem. Hard disk doesn't appear to work correctly. Whatever, that's not surprising on its own. Disconnect HDD, I don't need the noise.

Well, now the floppy controller/drive throws a 601 error on boot. It will switch on the drive motor if a disk is loaded, and never turns it off. I swapped drives and cables, same thing.

This is the "second generation" of the Fixed Disk and Diskette Drive Adapter (http://minuszerodegrees.net/5162/cards/5162_cards.htm#fddda_2) so it doesn't have the capacitors known to fail on the first generation.

Anyone have ideas of what else may go wrong with this card?

Failing that, suggestions on 3rd party replacements? I see that the IBM BIOS may throw a 601 if the FDDDA2 isn't installed at all, so there's that wrinkle. I'm having thoughts about the "Super I/O" multifunction ISA cards that went in later clones. That might need a different BIOS.

I'd love to keep this machine all-original IBM but it's not loving me back.

---

Older thread on this machine, that seems to have resolved itself:

https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/g...rror?79259-IBM-PC-XT-286-(5162)-memory-error=

 

[Malc]

The 5162 with original IBM Bios will throw a 601 error if either or both the hard drive / Floppy drive is Faulty / Not connected, So with the Controller fitted and NO hard drive or Floppy drive connected you should see 2 601 error's on the screen.

Some thoughts:
(1) Are you 100% sure your Floppy drive and Floppy boot disk is Good ?

(2) What size is the floppy boot disk, A 360k or 1.2M, If it's a 1.2M try a 360k boot floppy, If the bios has lost it's settings it will default to 360k.

(3) Make sure the fingers on the controller card are perfectly clean, Clean them and try the card in different slots.

(4) Put the 16-bit IBM Controller in an 8-bit slot and connect the floppy drive, Can you boot from it then ?

 

[jakari]

Thanks for replying.

I'll start with the fact that the 201 memory errors from my other thread are now recurring intermittently, so that might be confounding this. They *might* be SIMM socket related now that I poke at it, so those will get cleaned.

The 5162 with original IBM Bios will throw a 601 error if either or both the hard drive / Floppy drive is Faulty / Not connected, So with the Controller fitted and NO hard drive or Floppy drive connected you should see 2 601 error's on the screen.

Some thoughts:
(1) Are you 100% sure your Floppy drive and Floppy boot disk is Good ?

(2) What size is the floppy boot disk, A 360k or 1.2M, If it's a 1.2M try a 360k boot floppy, If the bios has lost it's settings it will default to 360k.

(3) Make sure the fingers on the controller card are perfectly clean, Clean them and try the card in different slots.

(4) Put the 16-bit IBM Controller in an 8-bit slot and connect the floppy drive, Can you boot from it then ?

(0) If either/both are not-connected: ok, I'll hook the HDD back up and re-test just to rule it out. (Pretty sure the HDD is mechanically defective.)

(1) Call it 90% certain. Both worked at least a few times before they didn't. I am planning to test the drive in another machine already, as well as a second one I have.

(2) The IBM Setup disk is 360kB. (Which you then use to set the drive type, once it boots.)

(3) The card edge has been cleaned with DeOxit Gold (100% in the pen) but I'll swab it again and try other slots.

(4) Will try it in a 8-bit slot.