AHA1542B & MiniScribe 9380S & The Friggin Floppy Drive

[Robert Ransbottom]

In article <197 at hacker.UUCP> steve at hacker.UUCP (Stephen M. Youndt) writes:
>The Subject line says it all.  I can't for the life of me get my floppy 
>drive to work off of the 1542B.  The Hard disk seems to be just fine, although 
>I won't know that until I can put something bootable on it.  I suspect it's
>one of the jumpers on the 1542 that needs to be changed, or something in the
>BIOS (AMI on my AMAX386/20 Motherboard).  If anybody has done this let me 
>know.  Anytime I try a new configuration, the 1542 BIOS does its message thing
>then the message of NO BASIC ROM or Cannot find Floppy Drive A appears and I can
>get no farther.  I can rule out a cable problem, because I'm using it now on
                                     ^^^^^^^????

I had the same problem twice.  Putting a 1542 in for a test run, and
in for good, on a Cache 386 25Mhz (AMI bios).
The 1542 defaults were all fine.  Twiddling w/ the SCSI cables excorised the
problem both times.  The SCSI LUN #whatever was not being reported
as found.  This was not obvious as the Adaptec BIOS message was cleared
away for the mo-board BIOS config info banner. (Bad design on AMI's part:
this stuff should just scroll.)

>on my MFM controller.  Oh, and all the time that the system is going through 
>its BIOS routines, from power on to power off, the FD access light stays on.
					                 ^^^^yep, this too
>Do I need a special cable to use with the 1542B for my floppy?  Please help.

Sometimes my unit would repeatedly go thru the BIOSes then cold reboot.