AHA1542B & MiniScribe 9380S & The Friggin Floppy Drive

[Gary Coffman]

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
>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.
>Do I need a special cable to use with the 1542B for my floppy?  Please help.
>
>In an unrelated vane.  Does anyone out there know how to get the AMAX386/20
>Motherboard/AMI BIOS to recognize banks 2 and 3 of RAM?  I just installed
>4 MB additional, and would very much like to use it.  Thanks in advance for
>any help you can give. -- SMY

Ok, this may be stupid, but, I think you have the cable for the floppy
on the AHA1542 upside down. Pin one, the red stripe, should be toward
the front of the computer. This would swap the ground leads with the active 
leads. It would make the drive activity led stay on all the time and would 
cause the BIOS to report no floppy drive and attempt to access the nonexistant
ROM Basic.

Gary