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My PC XT clone went up in smoke (literally) the other day. I salvaged the half height 5.25" double density floppy drive though and dropped it into an old 1.8 ghz AMD tower I had laying around. Plan is to migrate whatever I can forward onto more modern media.

I'm able to boot off the drive (setup as A) and run DOS 3.2 successfully (as well as some self-booting old games). Since I also have a 3.5" drive B, I can move data to a slightly more common format, so basically a success.

What's odd though, is if I boot the machine off the hard drive into Windows XP I have problems with the 5.25" drive. It knows it's there. Drive B works perfectly normal. Drive A though fails with General I/O error on access around 90% of the time. On the rare occasion it works the first time after boot, it will stay working. However, most times it won't work after booting. Definitely Windows XP specific behaviour as DOS works perfect every time.

Any known issues with 360k drives with Windows XP? If not, anyone know a registry key for adding extra delay for drives that are slow to start (my only working theory currently is that this drive may be a little slower to respond than expected).

Brian Knoblauch
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    I used to have a Windows 95 PC that only properly accepted my B: floppy drive when I unchecked that drive's detection in the BIOS – tofro Jun 07 '17 at 17:38
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    What happens when you boot into DOS, "talk" to the drive, then start Windows? (I assume you haven't got the NT version.) – wizzwizz4 Jun 07 '17 at 17:53
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    It probably confused about what type the drive is, thinking its either a 1.2 MB 5.25" drive or a 3.5" drive. Make sure the BIOS has both A: and B: drives configured correctly. Also check that the icons for the A: and B: drives in My Computer have little 5.25" and 3.5" floppies respectively. –  Jun 07 '17 at 21:52
  • @wizzwizz4 DOS doesn't even see the hard drive... – Brian Knoblauch Jun 07 '17 at 22:12
  • Oh geez, I put Windows 95... Was supposed to be XP. Doh... Editing... – Brian Knoblauch Jun 07 '17 at 22:13
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    Windows XP requires that floppies be formatted with a correct media descriptor byte, so it might just be a problem with how your floppies are formatted. –  Jun 07 '17 at 23:21
  • @RossRidge I don't think it's the media descriptor byte as the problem does not track with which disk I happen to have in. It's random, and each subsequent disk in the session will follow the results of the first one. – Brian Knoblauch Jun 08 '17 at 12:58
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    @tofro: I wouldn't recommend that, as I remember W9x corrupting either the FAT or the root directory (can't remember which) after swapping floppies when the floppy drive was disabled in the BIOS. – ninjalj Jun 08 '17 at 16:27
  • @ninjalj I had that PC for years and never lost any data - The alternative would have been no drive. What's worse? – tofro Jun 09 '17 at 19:29
  • 360k drives don't tend to support the 'Disk changed' signal. If the XP floppy driver depends on this, that might explain why the drive isn't working under XP. – john_e Jun 12 '17 at 08:42
  • Just so it doesn't go without mention, is the correct capacity for the floppy drive selected in the BIOS setup? – rakslice Nov 12 '18 at 22:15
  • @rakslice Yes, capacity is correctly set in BIOS setup – Brian Knoblauch Nov 13 '18 at 13:01

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Sounds like a software-related issue. Firstly, I'd check if it works with any newer DOS release - try DOS6.22 or even DOS7 from China DOS Union. If that works, then I'd setup a Windows 98 SE on another partition/HDD and copy files using this OS; If you really need to do it on XP, then I would recommend removing the 3,5" drive and using its place on the FDD cable as the place for the 5,25" one. Windows XP can be quite picky on working with 5,25" drives, mostly because when it arrived in 2001 they already were an oddity - M$ included the support for them, but they probably didn't care enough to betatest it properly, and some bugs may occur.

redsPL
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    Turns out that Windows XP just times out too fast on this drive. Non-Windows OS handle it fine. – Brian Knoblauch Nov 13 '18 at 13:03
  • And, despite being an oddity even when XP was released, Microsoft retained native 5.25"-floppy support through at least Windows 7. – Vikki Mar 31 '20 at 17:23