Z77 extreme6: problem with floppy disk drive

[Raven76]

Hi!
I've bought an asrock z77 extreme6 with an i7-3770k and 16gb of ram (win7 64 bit)... All goes wery well!
I've only a problem with the floppy controller (yes, I still use a floppy reader). If I set the controller to ENABLE, with NO diskette is inserted, after the boot the motherboard get stuck with a black screen and a cursor blinking (the operating system doesn't load from C:\). If a boot diskette is inserted, the floppy makes the boot correctly.
If I disable the floppy as the first boot device, the operating system will load, but than, there is no floppy drive available at all... (no A:\ in win7!).
I tried to change the cable and also the reader... I even did a clear CMOS, but no changes.... what do you think it could be?!

Summary (required for my bad english!):
1. The system lock up (black screen and a cursor blinking) with Floppy as first boot device WITHOUT a diskette inserted.
2. The system boot regularly from the floppy drive, if a boot diskette is inserted.
3. The system boot regularly and the operating system will load from the Hard Drive if the floppy drive is NOT the first boot device.
4. From the above point 3, Windows 7 recognizes the floppy controller, but NO the floppy drive (there is NO A:\ unit)

Thanks in advance! Regards...

[Justin Rennex]

Hello
Are you booting from the floppy drive to load a floppy disk for e.g DoS?
Its normal that booting with out a disk that the screen goes black with a curser, the kernal is not going to read from a blank, unsupported, unreadable, different format or a disk that has no information to load so booting can proceed. enabling a drive that has a supported disk will boot as long as the information contained has an image of some sort or from a disk operating system that can be used to fix issues or to boot to an operating system such as linux, mac or windows.

[Justin Rennex]

Also when referring to floppy boots it can mean a thumb drive but seeing that mainboard is supporting a floppy then maybe not.

[Raven76]

Thanks for your reply... On ALL others mainboards I've ever seen, if the first device in the boot order set in the bios doesn't have the operating system, the boot proceed to try with the second device, than the third, etc etc... it should NOT stuck on black screen... the bioses boot order has been created especially for this!

[Justin Rennex]

Yer thats right. When optical drive is set as first boot and if a disk is in the drive then the operating system want boot. If there is no disk image on the disk then it will go to black screen with a flashing curser or If first boot is set to optical drive and no disk in drive the next available image will be chosen such as on you hdd ie windows and boot priority is given to the hard disk drive with the bootable image. The same goes for a: drive a dos program such as ms dos would need to be present to make a successful boot from that drive if no dos a black screen. Taking the floppy out will then have the firmware look for the next availble bootable image and then boot that. No disk it finds image, non bootable image black screen with flashing curser.

[mrbit]

Hi...
I updated a new Z77 Extreme6 to BIOS 2.20 and installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64.
My problem was similar as described above and i examined this issue in detail:
I have four Boot Devices:
A = AHCI P0: ADATA SP 900 (my SSD with OS connected to SATA3-A1)
B = RAID P4: ATAPI iHOS104 (my blueray ROM connected to SATA2-2)
C = USB: Generic-Compact Flash 1.00
D = Floppy
+ Also two HDs are connected to SATA3-0/1 and working in RAID1-Mode for data storing
+ Floppy = Enabled
+ Fast Boot = Disabled
+ Rapid Start = Disabeld
+ Smart Connect = Disabled

1st Bootsequence:
#1 = A, #2 = B, #3 = C, #4 = D
=> Drive A: was not shown in windows explorer instead of floppy controler is shown in device manager

2nd Bootsequence:
#1 = A, #2 = B, #3 = D, #4 = C
=> Drive A: was not shown in windows explorer instead of floppy controler is shown in device manager


3rd Bootsequence:
#1 = A, #2 = C, #3 = B, #4 = D
=> Drive A: was shown in windows explorer

4th Bootsequence:
#1 = C, #2 = A, #3 = B, #4 = D
=> Drive A: was shown in windows explorer

I took contact to ASROCK support and got the answer that a wrong behaviour of the floppy handling could be verified.

The support member will contact his colleagues in taiwan. So i hope there will be a BIOS-Update soon to fix this issue.

Mr.Bit