27 Feb
2002
27 Feb
'02
7:17 a.m.
Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to get one of those multi-position
wafer switches that one sees in A/B/C/D switches for attaching multiple
computers to a single monitor/keyboard/mouse and attach one to each drive.
That way you can select the drive configuration you want for any two (which is
what the PC will support) of the 4 or 5 drives you have. There are other
approaches, but this one will produce predictable results, provided you study
out the configuration options in advance.
BTW, those 3-1/2"/5-1/4" comination drives look like two drives to the
controller. There's even an option jumper for selecting which drive is 'A'
and which is /'B.'
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "David C. Jenner" <djenner(a)earthlink.net>
To: "Classic Computer Mailing List" <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 1:22 PM
Subject: Multiple floppies in one system?
I'm putting together an old 486 system, one of
whose main purposes will be
to
read/write floppies of several formats. Like
5.25" 360K, 720K, 1.2M, RX50,
etc.,
and 3.5" 720K and 1.44M. I also want to be able
to copy RX50s disk to disk
on
the appropriate drive type.
So I figure it'll take 4 drives (or maybe 3 drives where one is a
3.5"/5.25"
combo). All of these would be in one enclosure.
The question is, how to do this without having to unplug/plug drives every
time you want to make a configuration change? It would be nice to just be
able to throw a switch or two to re-configure. Not having to get into the
enclosure would be nice, too.
I've thought of two ways to do it, but I'm not sure they'll work, or if
there
might not be a better way.
1) Plug all the drives into one control cable and switch on/off the power
to the drives to select them.
2) Plug all the drives into one control cable and select the drives by
switching a control line on the control cable.
Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Dave
--
David C. Jenner
djenner(a)earthlink.net