Problem with floppy drive when Exabyte QIC tape drive connected

[Sbarry]

I recently bought a new PC and moved my old peripherals over to it, one of which is an Exabyte Eagle TR-3 tape drive. The tape drive was working fine in my old system. The new system has an on-board floppy controller. The floppy drive is working fine on the new system.

Here's the problem - when I connect up the tape drive to the floppy controller using the cable that came with the tape drive (which was working fine in the old system), the floppy drive stops working with High density floppies. Inserting the floppy gets the error message of 'The disk in drive A is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?' However, low density diskettes can be read with no problem. But HD ones can't be read and in fact get corrupted (in a way that is similar to the cable being reversed).

The tape drive itself seems to work ok, at least in the limited Restore operations I have tested it with.

I have double checked all the cable connections. The cable coming out of the floppy is the original one that works when it is connected to the motherboard controller. Its only when it is plugged into the tape drive cable (as it is supposed to be) that the floppy stops working correctly.

[ixl]

I'll bet they are both set to the same drive letter. have you tried changing the drive jumper on the tape drive?
Exabyte used to make dedicated floppy accelerator cards too that might help here...

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.

[Sbarry]

I looked at the floppy drive and couldn't find any jumpers on it.

I also tried taking the original floppy drive and cables from the old PC (where everything worked ok) and connect them into the new PC. This did not fix anything. So it seems to me that there is something odd about the floppy controller on the motherboard. I ran the Exabyte diagnostics on it and it says it is 1 Mbit cabably so I should not need the Accelarator card (which I'm trying to avoid buying).

[ixl]

It could just be an incompatibility of some sort. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif As floppy tapes are becoming more scarce I'll bet a lot of companies aren't bothering to test them any more.
If I recall correctly, the tape accelerator card is 2 Mbit (could be wrong) which would provide a noticeable performance boost...
Try to find one used on ebay maybe??

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.

[Paleo Pete]

A couple of things to check.

Look in BIOS to be sure the floppy is seen as a 1.44MB drive. Disable Swap Floppy Drive if it's enabled. (This swaps drives A and B if needed for some strange reason.)

Check in Device Manager and see if the floppy drive has a yellow splat beside it. Check the tape drive for one too.

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