10 Mar
2006
10 Mar
'06
8:57 a.m.
On 3/10/2006 at 1:17 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
Assuming that the FDC will work with two (I've
never heard of an FDC that
won't?), is there a way of telling MSDOS about the second drive even when
the BIOS refuses to acknowledge its presence?
First off, DRIVER.SYS depends on BIOS support; it's not clear if that's
present in your system.
But something of a bit more concern is if there's hardware support for the
second floppy. In other words, you need to determine if the extra "glue"
for drive select and motor control's present on that PC.
Here's how to determine what the score is. Cable your second drive up, and
stick a floppy in both drives. Boot DOS and start DEBUG. At the DEBUG
hyphen prompt enter:
-o 3f2 1c
The motor and the drive select LED should activate on the A: floppy Now
enter:
-o 3f2 2d
The LED and motor should deactivate on the first drive and the LED and
motor should activate on the second drive. If it doesn't, you probably
don't have hardware-level support. To quit, enter:
-o 3f2 04
-q
Even if the PC lacks hardware support, you can still use something like a
Microsolutions Backpack parallel-port floppy to get that second drive. If
your PC has hardware support, there were several third-party vendors of
low-level floppy support and I can probably dig in my archives and pull a
few out for you.
Cheers,
Chuck