IBM XT Floppy Drives Not Reading

[Area Man]

Or I should say, the 5160 is going through the whole boot sequence just fine, disks seem to be accessing fine, then the machine goes to Basic. I've tried 3 different drives looks like one is dead), and 2 different cables and controllers.
Is there a jumper or something on the mainboard that I'm missing, or some other setting or something that is causing the machine to ship loading LOS from disk and go to Basic, or is something hosed?
I'm new to these machines, so I would not be surprised if I just missed something stupidly obvious :smile:

Thanks!

 

[SomeGuy]

What precisely are you trying to boot? Also, what specific kinds of drives and controllers are you using?

A common problem is that 360k drives can not reliably read 360k disks that have been written in a 1.2mb drive.

As far as configuration:
A 5160 does have dip switches to set the number of drives:
http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/5160/misc/5160_motherboard_switch_settings.htm
Since most PC floppy controllers use a "twisted" cable, make sure that both drives are jumpered as "second" drive (DS1 if labeled DS0/DS1/DS2/DS4), and that your "A" drive is attached after the twist (also check that there is only one twist, if there are two twists then "A" is the first).

 

[Area Man]

I'm trying to load DOS from a Tandon TN100-2A drive.

As far as I can tell, everything is connected properly, dip switches and jumpers set properly.

I'm going to start pulling known good parts from a working machine to see if I can locate the problem, because at this point I don't know what else to do.

 

[Area Man]

Turns out the drives are all just not working. So now its on to learning about the inner workings of 5.25 floppy drives, see if at least one of these things is salvageable.