9 Oct
2005
9 Oct
'05
10:09 a.m.
On 10/9/2005 at 12:47 PM Roger Merchberger wrote:
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.
Oddly, Winders XP just "might" support such a card, if the card has reasonable
ACPI or PnP capabilities and it otherwise looks enough like a legacy floppy controller.
DMA is abstracted sufficiently in the NT kernel interface that the floppy code doesn't
worry too much about what form it takes. I don't believe that the generic NT floppy
driver supports PIO access in lieu of DMA, however.
(I'm bundling XP/2000 under the heading of "NT" because there's not a
whole lot of difference between the flavors at that level. Remember that betas of 2000
were called "NT 5.0").
Where you'd have some problems would be with the VxD floppy support under Win9x. But
then, you should be able to force BIOS access by disabling or deleting the floppy port
driver.
Where you'd have problems is with MS-DOS utilities that access the drives directly and
expect to program an 8237 DMA controller. Many such utilities have DMA 2/IRQ 6
hardwired.
Cheers,
Chuck