9 Oct
2005
9 Oct
'05
6:03 p.m.
Subject: Re: PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware
From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch at 30below.com>
Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 12:47:02 -0400
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
Rumor has it that Chuck Guzis may have mentioned these words:
Roger, you hit the nail on the head. If you want to use XP and the latest
PentiumMMV at 200ghz and read old media it'seems there is an incongreuity
there. It would appear more reasonable to use an older less underloaded
machine and a more flexible version of winders for such a task.
For tasks like this where the interface is going to be "unusual" XP,
win2000 and NT are likely not the best choice as they are known to poorly
or not support untested/certified hardware.
Allison
On 10/9/2005 at 11:04 AM Scott Stevens wrote:
I've seen several BIOSs can be set up for that - you can set the IRQ & DMA
on a per-slot basis.
However, I'll admit that it's a crapshoot... you'd want to make sure that
the mobo supports what you want to do. ;-) I'm also *not* going to say that
WindersXP will actually support it, as you *might* have to disable
Plug-N-Pray to get it to work.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
-- I've never seen a PCI card that had a floppy
interface on it. I'm sure
they exist. Not in my junkbox, however, and I don't have the schematic
diagram for them.
And there's a good reason for that. The PCI bus has no access to legacy
8237-type DMA, so legacy driver code would not work on such a beast.