PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

9 Oct 2005

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Subject: Re: PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware
   From: Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net>
   Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 11:04:39 -0500
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
  Gee I posted about doing just that.  If the
machine has ISA there is
 no need to mod the card.  Just disable (in bios) the mainboard level
 FDC and plug in the ISA unit and go.

But does that work without digging in further?  Does a PC/XT-era floppy
card replicate a PC-AT diskette controller?  I am asking, since I've
never tackled such a project. 
It did for me.  Though I had one really old XT class card that was so 
crippled 1.44 3.5" was out of it's range. Most of the later smaller
ISA-8 cards were never a problem. 

...
     Also PCI
cards work nice for that.

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. 
I must have a bigger junk box. I have two FDC/IDE (jumpers for disables)
and several FDC/IDE/Serial/parallel Combo cards for PCI.  They came out
of PCI machines that predated the everything_on_one boards.  JDRmicrodevices
still sells some of them.

Even if you can't (never ran into one) disable the on_main_board function
many of the older cards can be set up for secondary FDC, IDE and so on.
Then you may have to give up using the latest version of XP too.

Allison