10 Mar
2006
10 Mar
'06
5:17 a.m.
Can't remember if there's a way of doing this or not!
I've acquired a nice compact HP PC which I had plans to use as a data recovery
box - except that I've just discovered that the braindead BIOS only supports
one floppy disk drive; I need a 3.5" HD drive as the first disk and a 5.25" HD
drive as the second...
Assuming that the FDC will work with two (I've never heard of an FDC that
won't?), is there a way of telling MSDOS about the second drive even when the
BIOS refuses to acknowledge its presence?
If not, the whole machine's off to the tip... stoopid PCs, grrr! (actually,
I'll freecycle it, which is where I got it from, but the thought of it being
crushed makes me feel better right now)
cheers
Jules
10 Mar
10 Mar
5:19 a.m.
On 3/10/06, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Can't remember if there's a way of doing this or not!
I've acquired a nice compact HP PC which I had plans to use as a data recovery
box - except that I've just discovered that the braindead BIOS only supports
one floppy disk drive; I need a 3.5" HD drive as the first disk and a 5.25" HD
drive as the second...
Assuming that the FDC will work with two (I've never heard of an FDC that
won't?), is there a way of telling MSDOS about the second drive even when the
BIOS refuses to acknowledge its presence?
If not, the whole machine's off to the tip... stoopid PCs, grrr! (actually,
I'll freecycle it, which is where I got it from, but the thought of it being
crushed makes me feel better right now)
DRIVER.SYS, isn't it?
device=c:\dos\driver.sys (parms)
In config.sys, where the parameters are the same as for the DRIVPARM
directive in config.sys, which tells DOS about the existing floppy
drive it can already see.
Not that I've tried this in some 15y or so...
--
Liam Proven ? http://livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lproven
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7:50 a.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
On 3/10/06, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at
yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Hmmm, I forgot that DOS 5 or 6 or whatever it is that I was running came with
help - looks like driveparm *should* do it, except that it's not clear how the
device numbering works...
Instead of using drive letters, it uses drive numbers - so according to the
docs 0 would be A:, but 1 could either be B: if a second drive was found, or
C: if it wasn't.
Got horribly confused at that point, decided that I didn't want a messed-up
hard disk if the B: drive wasn't seen, and kicked the machine. :-)
I've gone back to a previous system now which has a sensible BIOS (and
on-board SCSI and audio, which may be handy for other data recovery stuff
anyway). Shame the case is huge, but at least there's room for four 5.25"
devices, and I could probably shoehorn an 8" drive on it's side in there too
if needs be with a bit of hacksaw work!
Can't remember if there's a way of doing this or not!
I've acquired a nice compact HP PC which I had plans to use as a data recovery
box - except that I've just discovered that the braindead BIOS only supports
one floppy disk drive; I need a 3.5" HD drive as the first disk and a 5.25" HD
drive as the second...
Assuming that the FDC will work with two (I've never heard of an FDC that
won't?), is there a way of telling MSDOS about the second drive even when the
BIOS refuses to acknowledge its presence?
If not, the whole machine's off to the tip... stoopid PCs, grrr! (actually,
I'll freecycle it, which is where I got it from, but the thought of it being
crushed makes me feel better right now)
DRIVER.SYS, isn't it?
device=c:\dos\driver.sys (parms) Not that I've tried this in some 15y or so...
No, nor me - last time was on an XT somewhere around 1990 I think...
cheers
J.
8:38 a.m.
On 3/10/06, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Hmmm, I forgot that DOS 5 or 6 or whatever it is that
I was running came with
help - looks like driveparm *should* do it, except that it's not clear how the
device numbering works...
Oh yes indeed, and it's pretty good.
Instead of using drive letters, it uses drive numbers
- so according to the
docs 0 would be A:, but 1 could either be B: if a second drive was found, or
C: if it wasn't.
Got horribly confused at that point, decided that I didn't want a messed-up
hard disk if the B: drive wasn't seen, and kicked the machine. :-)
Oh, no, it wouldn't do that. Hard drives are addressed totally
differently & there'd be no confusion unless you told
drivparm/driver.sys to use drive C: - not sure what would happen then!
I've gone back to a previous system now which has
a sensible BIOS (and
on-board SCSI and audio, which may be handy for other data recovery stuff
anyway). Shame the case is huge, but at least there's room for four 5.25"
devices, and I could probably shoehorn an 8" drive on it's side in there too
if needs be with a bit of hacksaw work!
Eeeesh. Good luck!
No, nor me - last time was on an XT somewhere around
1990 I think...
How the years and decades fly by...
--
Liam Proven ? http://livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lproven
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
Gmail/Google Talk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
9:06 a.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
Heh heh. It'll be far easier for me to hang the 8" drive outside the case -
but *technically* there is room for it to fit inside providing I relocate the
hard disk and don't use any large expansion cards...
Ultimately I want to get rid of the hard disk anyway, and boot from something
like compact flash - as control and actual storage for disk images would be
external to this box with the floppy drives in, there's no need for any actual
large hard disk in the machine. All I need is OS + disk + network access code
to come from *somewhere* (possibly even ROM I suppose)
cheers
J.
On 3/10/06, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at
yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Yes, it didn't say in the help how device numbers were translated to actual
drives though - last thing I wanted was DOS thinking my hard disk had 80
tracks and suddenly crashing when booting :-)
I'm not quite sure why it uses a device numbering scheme, when the device
numbers can change depending on what hardware's attached (mind you I have no
idea what happens if you were to add a second floppy controller say - whether
drives 3 and 4 become devices 2 and 3, or if they follow on after and hard
disks (and become say, 3 and 4 in a system with a single hard disk)
The relationship between the numbering and the physical devices wasn't
documented :-(
Instead of using drive letters, it uses drive
numbers - so according to the
docs 0 would be A:, but 1 could either be B: if a second drive was found, or
C: if it wasn't.
Got horribly confused at that point, decided that I didn't want a messed-up
hard disk if the B: drive wasn't seen, and kicked the machine. :-)
Oh, no, it wouldn't do that. Hard drives are addressed totally
differently & there'd be no confusion unless you told
drivparm/driver.sys to use drive C: - not sure what would happen then! I've gone
back to a previous system now which has a sensible BIOS (and
on-board SCSI and audio, which may be handy for other data recovery stuff
anyway). Shame the case is huge, but at least there's room for four 5.25"
devices, and I could probably shoehorn an 8" drive on it's side in there too
if needs be with a bit of hacksaw work!
Eeeesh. Good luck! 
3:53 p.m.
On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, Jules Richardson wrote:
>> Assuming that the FDC will work with two
(I've never heard of an FDC that
>> won't?),
There do exist some pissy machines that do not have the second drive drive
select and motor on signals on the connector! Is such a deliberately
bad machine worth spending some time with a soldering iron?
> DRIVER.SYS, isn't it?
> device=c:\dos\driver.sys (parms)
the parms are /D:drive number
/F:drive type
Instead of using drive letters, it uses drive numbers
- so according to the
docs 0 would be A:, but 1 could either be B: if a second drive was found, or
C: if it wasn't.
Neither DRIVPARM nor DRIVER.SYS will affect, nor even notice the existence
of your hard drive.
0 is the first physical floppy;
1 is the second physical floppy;
2 is the third physical floppy;
3 is the fourth physical floppy.
Int 13h (plus its XT extensions) uses 80h for the first hard disk, 81h for
the second hard disk. If you want to use more than 128 floppy drives on
one machine, then your problems would be more than the BIOS numbering.
DRIVER.SYS is an ordinary block device driver, so it assigns the next
letter to the drive. Therefore, your second floppy will be drive D: (or
more, if you have other drivers loading first). LASTDRIVE=Z: may be
necessary.
DRIVPARM, OTOH, changes parameters for existing drives, and does not
create additional drive letters. DRIVPARM is incompatible with MOST
OEM IBM BIOS's, and is therefore undocumented in PC-DOS (but IS there,
and DOES work with non-IBM BIOS)
DRIVER.SYS and DRIVPARM were introduced with DOS 3.20, and don't appear to
have changed much over the years, other than adding additional supported
drive types.
Got horribly confused at that point, decided that I
didn't want a messed-up
hard disk if the B: drive wasn't seen, and kicked the machine. :-)
NOTE: always wear steel toed boots around non-classic PCs.
I've gone back to a previous system now which has
a sensible BIOS (and
on-board SCSI and audio, which may be handy for other data recovery stuff
anyway). Shame the case is huge, but at least there's room for four 5.25"
devices, and I could probably shoehorn an 8" drive on it's side in there too
if needs be with a bit of hacksaw work!
don't forget to include 3", 3.5", (could prob'ly skip 3.25"),
floptical,
ZIP, ORB, JAZ, tape drives, CD, DVD, memory card readers, . . .
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
8:57 a.m.
On 3/10/2006 at 1:17 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
Assuming that the FDC will work with two (I've
never heard of an FDC that
won't?), is there a way of telling MSDOS about the second drive even when
the BIOS refuses to acknowledge its presence?
First off, DRIVER.SYS depends on BIOS support; it's not clear if that's
present in your system.
But something of a bit more concern is if there's hardware support for the
second floppy. In other words, you need to determine if the extra "glue"
for drive select and motor control's present on that PC.
Here's how to determine what the score is. Cable your second drive up, and
stick a floppy in both drives. Boot DOS and start DEBUG. At the DEBUG
hyphen prompt enter:
-o 3f2 1c
The motor and the drive select LED should activate on the A: floppy Now
enter:
-o 3f2 2d
The LED and motor should deactivate on the first drive and the LED and
motor should activate on the second drive. If it doesn't, you probably
don't have hardware-level support. To quit, enter:
-o 3f2 04
-q
Even if the PC lacks hardware support, you can still use something like a
Microsolutions Backpack parallel-port floppy to get that second drive. If
your PC has hardware support, there were several third-party vendors of
low-level floppy support and I can probably dig in my archives and pull a
few out for you.
Cheers,
Chuck
10:21 a.m.
On 3/10/2006 at 1:17 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
Can't remember if there's a way of doing this
or not!
I've acquired a nice compact HP PC which I had plans to use as a data
recovery box - except that I've just discovered that the braindead BIOS
only
supports one floppy disk drive; I need a 3.5" HD
drive as the first disk
and a
5.25" HD drive as the second...
Even without expansion slots, any PC with a parallel port can support
additional SCSI hard drives using a parallel-to-SCSI adapter like an
Adaptec 358. It's not fast, but it's adequate.
Cheers,
Chuck
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cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
julesrichardsonuk＠yahoo.co.uk -
lproven＠gmail.com