TEAC FD505 Dual Floppy Drive.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael Nowotny
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M

Michael Nowotny

I have a TEAC FD-505 dual floppy drive that contains both
a 3.5" slot and a 5.25" slot... I was unclear as to
whether or not windows supports this device, so I checked
the windows HCL and didn't find it there. Albeit it is a
very old legacy device, I still believe there should be a
way to get it working. It only uses one fdd cable
connection which I have going from it the motherboard,
but it chains that connection internall so it's really
more like you're just connecting two floppy drives to one
cable. The motherboard manufacturer I contacted (MSI)
said that more than one floppy drive was definately
supported.
The problem I have is that when I go to use the floppy
drive, windows acts as though it doesn't have device
drivers to utilize the drives. The drive has the green
light on so I know it's getting power, and I know the
cable is good from testing a newer 3.5" drive. Is there
any way to use other floppy disk controllers other than
the standard ones that are always installed for a floppy
drive in xp?

Please reply if possible, thanks.
-mike
 
Did you ever get a response from this? I was looking for drivers fo
the exact same device (is yours black?) and ran across this. I hav
gotten mine to work but it was tricky. Reply to this or send m
notification (not sure if you can through this posting site, never bee
here) and I'll get you some more info that should help...


I have a TEAC FD-505 dual floppy drive that contains both
a 3.5" slot and a 5.25" slot... I was unclear as to
whether or not windows supports this device... <SNIP


-
Pinio
 
Pinion said:
*Did you ever get a response from this? I was looking for driver
for the exact same device (is yours black?) and ran across this.
have gotten mine to work but it was tricky. Reply to this or send m
notification (not sure if you can through this posting site, neve
been here) and I'll get you some more info that should help...


I have a TEAC FD-505 dual floppy drive that contains both
a 3.5" slot and a 5.25" slot... I was unclear as to
whether or not windows supports this device... <SNIP> *
Click to expand...

Hi, I have the same problem, can you let me know how you got this driv
to work?
I have an HP motherboard using Windows ME.
Thanks

Sean

please email me at (e-mail address removed), since I do not frequen
this board often.
Thank


-
sean-blair
 
Teac FD-505 dual floppy - getting it to work in XP

Been having a time of it, getting my newly installed Teac FD-505 dual floppy
to be recognized by my Dell Dimension 4100 computer that uses the XP Home
edition operating system. The green lights operate properly, so I know that
the power is hooked up correctly, but every time I boot up I get the message
'02B0: Diskette Drive A Error'. The System Manager says drive A is working
perfectly! Can anyone share their solutions to this nightmare with me?

hextek
 
Michael Nowotny said:
I have a TEAC FD-505 dual floppy drive that contains both
a 3.5" slot and a 5.25" slot... I was unclear as to
whether or not windows supports this device, so I checked
the windows HCL and didn't find it there. Albeit it is a
very old legacy device, I still believe there should be a
way to get it working. It only uses one fdd cable
connection which I have going from it the motherboard,
but it chains that connection internall so it's really
more like you're just connecting two floppy drives to one
cable. The motherboard manufacturer I contacted (MSI)
said that more than one floppy drive was definately
supported.
The problem I have is that when I go to use the floppy
drive, windows acts as though it doesn't have device
drivers to utilize the drives. The drive has the green
light on so I know it's getting power, and I know the
cable is good from testing a newer 3.5" drive. Is there
any way to use other floppy disk controllers other than
the standard ones that are always installed for a floppy
drive in xp?

Please reply if possible, thanks.
-mike
Click to expand...



It doesn't need anything but standard built in Windows drivers. As far as the computer is concerned, it's two separate floppy drives. Make sure the BIOS, jumpers, and cables are correctly configured. Note that Windows 2000 will not recognize 8 sector or single sided floppies, so if you have any old 8 sector formatted double density or single sided disks, you'll need to boot Windows NT 4 or below, DOS 3.3 - 6.22, DOS 7.X (the DOS that comes with Windows 95/98), or Windows 95, 98, or ME to read them and copy their contents to a hard drive. If you have any backups using the infamous DOS BACKUP command, use the version of RESTORE from DOS 6.X, Windows 9X, or Windows NT 4 to restore them. Earlier versions of RESTORE were DOS version and even OEM dependent. Windows 2000 does not include the RESTORE on it's installation disk, but the version from Windows NT 4 works fine under Windows 2000. I'm sure it will also work under XP or VISTA, but I haven't tested that. If you don't have a Windows NT 4 installation disk, perhaps the Windows 9X versions will work just as well under more modern operating systems.





hextek said:
Been having a time of it, getting my newly installed Teac FD-505 dual floppy
to be recognized by my Dell Dimension 4100 computer that uses the XP Home
edition operating system. The green lights operate properly, so I know that
the power is hooked up correctly, but every time I boot up I get the message
'02B0: Diskette Drive A Error'. The System Manager says drive A is working
perfectly! Can anyone share their solutions to this nightmare with me?

hextek
Click to expand...


Make sure the BIOS is correctly set for one drive to be a 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy drive and the other to be a 5.25" 1.2 MB floppy drive. By default the 3.5" drive is A: drive, and the 5.25" drive is the B: drive, but that can be changed by either using the jumpers or cable installation. If you hook it up to the B: drive connector, the drive assignments will be reversed. This can be useful if you actually want to boot from an old 5.25" floppy. The jumper and cable settings are documented in a PDF manual Teac still posts on their website. I will post a link to their support site below.


http://www.teac.com/DSPD/support/floppy_drives/whnjs.htm
 
Last edited:
TEAC FD-505 dual floppy drive - inability to make it work!

South Texan:

Sorry to be so late in responding to your reply to my original thread, dated 3-07. I tried everything to
get the device installed and working, but to no avail. I have just tried it while running a Windows 98SE
operating system, thinking that perhaps the Windows XP system was too advanced to accommodate it, but
it still gives me the same error message as before, and never acknowledges the presence of drive B! I
sure would like to be able to make use of that 5.25" drive so I would have use of some old floppies
with very valuable files on them.

I followed the instructions in the TEAC manual I downloaded per your suggestion for installing the
cables, and I still get the green operating light on when I load a floppy, and the floppy in the A drive
even spins until I eject it, so it looks like at least something is working.

I will be more diligent waiting for your reply this time, and sure hope you can give me some more
suggestions as to why I fail to succeed.

Hextek
 
Last edited:
hextek said:
South Texan:
Sorry to be so late in responding to your reply to my original thread, dated 3-07. I tried everything to
get the device installed and working, but to no avail. I have just tried it while running a Windows 98SE
operating system, thinking that perhaps the Windows XP system was too advanced to accommodate it, but it still gives me the same error message as before, and never acknowledges the presence of drive B! I
sure would like to be able to make use of that 5.25" drive so I would have use of some old floppies
with very valuable files on them.
Hextek
Click to expand...

I've never installed a 5.25" drive in a computer with Windows XP installed. The most recent operating system I have used with them is Windows 2000, and it still won't read anything but 9 sector floppies. Have you tried booting DOS? Also if that doesn't work, do you have another computer in which you can install the floppy drive? I've found that vastly different vintages of computer components have difficulty interoperating correctly. If you could find a 486 motherboard, that would probably be ideal.

Do you have any other 5.25" floppy drive you could try?

Also, are the disks you are trying to read high density 1.2 MB or double density 360 KB or even 320 KB? I have found that sometimes high density floppy drives sometimes have trouble reading 360 KB disks especially old ones that were last written to over 20 years ago and many 360 KB disks can only be read by by a genuine 360 KB floppy drive.
 
Last edited:
hextek said:
South Texan:

I will be more diligent waiting for your reply this time, and sure hope you can give me some more
suggestions as to why I fail to succeed.

Hextek
Click to expand...



Good luck. At least you are dealing with a technology that was widespread. You should see what is being done to read the 42 year old NASA tapes containing high resolution (1 meter) Lunar Orbiter images taken in the 1960's to evaluate Apollo landing sites. The group restoring the images has revived two of the last existing drives that can read the 2" tapes from 4 machines that have been stored in a garage for over 20 years.

You should read this quote below.

http://www.moonviews.com/


The Challenges of Archiving

No Silver Bullet: Archive Challenges, Permabits and Petabytes

"Even worse, going beyond 5 years exceeds the functional life of media or recording technology, and maintaining physical readability becomes increasingly difficult. I'd be wiling to bet that a number of my readers have boxes of QIC-80 tapes in the garage or basement with old data on them. Even if the tapes have a 50 year lifespan, do you have any ideas on where to get a working QIC-80 tape drive? NASA just recently went through an amazing project to recover old Lunar Orbiter image data, involving finding, refurbishing and interfacing with 40-year-old Ampex tape drives, an enormous project covering more than a decade to complete. Media life isn't the problem with long-term data storage, and "archival-grade" media isn't going to solve your physical readability problems, because the reader hardware will never last as long as the media."




Posted by Keith Cowing on December 3, 2008 4:01 PM
Click to expand...
 
Hi, all

As far as I can recall, I had been able to successfully setup a such floppy drive on a "modern" supermicro board running W2K3 and had been able to read floppy from the 5.25 side at least. I remember that I had extracted this curious drive from a perfectly working 486 PC that went to trash years ago. Meanwhile, I have nothing on it's jumpers and south texan's link of 11/2007 is now dead for that.

I've followed moonviews link and found all that wonderfull - thank a lot.

Regards
Hervé WARIN seeking for a 100TPI 5.25 floppy drive.
 
Teac floppy manuals and jumper settings

Teac floppy drive jumper settings


Teac combo floppy drive jumper settings



The above two lines for the benefit of search engines.



These links worked as of February 27th, 2010----------



This is a diagram of the jumper block and settings for the combo drive, showing how to set either drive to

be the A: drive and the other to be the B: drive--


http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/dta/37030/00000005.htm


truncated part (edocs/dta/37030/00000005)



The links below are for pdf scans of Teac manuals (owner type, not service, though some of the info may help)

---------------------



Teac Combo (3.5" and 5.25") floppy drive manual pdf


http://www.teac.com/DSPD/pdf/5fd0010a.pdf



Teac 3.5" floppy drive manual pdf


http://www.teac.com/DSPD/pdf/3fd0020a.pdf



Teac 5.25" floppy drive manual pdf


http://www.teac.com/DSPD/pdf/5fd0050a.pdf


-----------------------------------------------------------------

If a time comes when those links don't work you can try emailing me at coastalnet.com and maybe I can send the one you need as an attachment. No guarantees. I'm not as good with software as hardware.

-----------------------------------------------------------------


Floppy drives can (if equipped with the necessary jumper pins) be set as Drive 0, 1, 2, or 3.

In IBM PC type computers they're generally either D0 (drive A: ) or D1 (drive B: ).

For assembly line speed IBM decided to have all of their original floppy drives set as D1 and the ribbon cables fabricated with a twist near one end in lines 10 through 16 which turned them into lines 16 through 10.

This makes the drive connected by the plug before this twist look like D1 and the one connected by the plug at the end of the cable after the twist to look like D0 to the computer.

Thus, which drive is the A: and which is the B: is decided by where along the cable they are connected. Connected in the middle, they're D1, or B:, connected at the end after the twist, they're D0, or A:.

Newer drives may only have jumpers for D0 and D1, or perhaps may be permanently set as D1.


If you manage to get a drive connected "backwards" (plug upside down) the light on the drive will come on and stay on.
 
TEAC dual floppy disk drive

I found this thread very useful and have some information to add this topic.

I bought my TEAC dual floppy drive new somewhere in the mid 90s and it has worked all this time.

I even checked the pdf files for the jumper settings, and my settings were still correct.

Today I had to replace my failing motherboard and come to discover that the new motherboard's
BIOS does not support more than one floppy drive.

I guess it is a sign of the times. Who uses floppies but us old timers...

So I suggest that these drives still work as designed, they just will not work with newer technology.

My next project is to find another old computer, install my dual floppy drive, and copy all my floppies to a more modern medium.
 
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