8 Oct
2005
8 Oct
'05
10:01 a.m.
On 10/8/2005 at 9:37 AM Fred Cisin wrote:
... or a SCSI "Floptical" (also handles
1.4M),
or MicroSolutions "Backpack" external parallel port floppy (my 2.8m one
has been pretty reliable),
or a second floppy controller (at an alternate address if you can't fully
disable the internal one),
or a manual toggle switch on the drive select lines (OK for drives that
you don't use often, such as 3" or 3.25"),
there were software controlled drive select switches available for adding
some of the floppy port tape drives - some of those CAN be used to switch
additional floppies.
The moment you start talking about non-DOS OS support hings like the parallel-port drives
and secondary controllers run into trouble with finding drivers to support them. The
"flopticals" like the LS-120 on SCSI (or even an old Teac FD-235S SCSI floppy)
have a problem in that they pretty much all assume 512 or 1024 byte sectors with very
regular addressing (like every USB drive I've ever seen), so they can't be used
for importing "foreign" media--and many DOS-based programs don't understand
them at all.
The current crop of Dell Optiplexes have no ISA slots at all, which makes any sort of
add-in floppy controller a bit of a problem.
Oddly, it may be cheapest and more expedient to simply trash the motherboard in the Dell,
stripping off the CPU and RAM and refit the box with another maker's motherboard with
full support (and an ISA slot or four).
Cheers,
Chuck