10 Dec
2004
10 Dec
'04
6:29 a.m.
There was an attempt to "simplify" connection of multiple floppy drives
(meaning TWO) at one time by adding a "twist" to the cable-- some
conductors in the ribbon are cut out and reversed, which is a sort of
"cable select" for floppy drives.
I seem to recall in this case that one would jumper both drives as drive A
in such a case, or as DS0.
Stupid idea. Use a straight thru floppy cable and jumper one for DS0 and
one for DS1. We get it.
If you intermingle the two drive select ideas you may have problems where
both or niether drives light up and niether can read.
Pete Turnbull
wrote:
Jerome Fine replies:
Under Windows 98 SE on a 750 MHz Pentium III, I installed
BOTH a 3.5" drive (A:) and a 5 1/4" drive (B:)
The ONLY real problem (aside from setting the jumpers and
using the correct cables, etc. was that at one point I
removed the 5 1/4" drive. When I attempted to add the
5 1/4" drive back to the configuration, I seem to remember
that it would NOT accept the second drive. Finally in
desperation, I removed the 3.5" drive as well, then added
back BOTH the 3.5" and 5 1/4" drives at the same time.
That seemed to solve the problem.
I use the 5 1/4" HD 1.2 MByte drive as an RX50 (sometimes
even as an RX33 with a change in the media - ask if there
are any questions) under E11 on the Pentium III so that
I can transfer small files (up to 400 KBytes) from/to a
PDP-11 with the real DEC RX50 drive. On the PC, PUTR from
John Wilson is also able to FORMAT (LLF) the RX50 media.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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--On Friday, December 10, 2004 07:40:53 -0500 Gene
Ehrich
<gehrich(a)tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
Is there any way to attach and access a
5-1/4" diskette drive on a
modern day PC under either WIN98SE or XP PRO?
Yes, just plug it in like a 3.5" drive. Assuming the drive has the
appropriate jumper settings for a PC, it will work fine. XP Pro will
even change the drive icon accordingly. I have 2 machines set up like
that. If this is the machine's second drive, the only gotcha I can
think of is that a small number of motherboards seem to only have one
drive select, and hence can only support one drive (my Asus is like
that -- I just disabled the on-board controller and used an old one).