Adding another floppy /

pulling the thread further off.... One solution for the floppy problem in the dos/winders world is your run of the mill 486 board with ISA bus. They do not disallow much as it was easily done to install two floppy/ide/serial/parallel cards using all of the available port addresses that were nominally assigned. The result of that is a system with 4 floppies, 4 IDE drives and 4 serial ports and two parallel ports. The motherboard is later 486/DX66 with 24mb and ISA16 bus and a large (256k cache). I was lucky to find a large horizontal case that allowed for a lot of drives and 300W of power. So the result is a 3.5 (720/1.44 floppy), 5.25 (48tpi teac FD55BV) and 5.25 (96tpi teac fd55gfr) and two 3.5" IDE drives at 512mb, IDE CDrom each plus N2000 compatable NIC and a 1mb VGA video card. The box is still not full at this point. With this transfers from any to most is easy, it runs any OS I'd care to use and have on hand (DOS, W3.1, W95b, NT4[WS and server], Linux, OS/2warp3, DRI Concurrent dos386V3). Rather than futz with the latest and greatest hardware and software for doing stuff that is mostly routine and very nontaxing for a 486 and DOS this was the easiest solution. It's proven handy for more than a few tasks and having most needed hardware in the box it is a workhorse. Having at least 500mb per drive is enough for most OSs if not choked with apps and still plenty of space for storage. CDrom makes install easy and fast. The extra parallel port is handy with a kangaroo parallel port to IDE adaptor. The three floppies means nothing common is likely unreadable. It's also a respectably fast enough to run MYz80 CP/M/z80 emulator. That is handy for pulling stuff off CP/M disks and munging it or even development. Allison