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

13 Oct 2005

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Subject: Re: PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware
   From: Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org>
   Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:39:22 +0000 (UTC)
     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Allison wrote:

  Another good choice is the 4" tall Dell
Pizza boxes such as the 425/np
 though 466/np.  Theses are small, use PS2 connectors for keyboard
 and mouse and the board supports most floppies (x2), IDE disks to 500mb
 and S3 VGA video.   There is room enough to add a CDrom or 5.25 floppy. 
I have 2 of these, and they're quite nice. You can run 25, 50, 33 and 60 
MHz chips in them with the right rejumpering (so my 425s are running 66Mhz 
now).   
I have done the same thing with 425s. all mine are DX/66.

...
 Dell even had the motherboard docs online, last I
checked. There's 
only one problem: the BIOS won't boot off any non-FAT formatted floppies,  
Mine do!  There is a bios selection for that.  The bios in these either 
boots the floppy or hard disk but doesn't switch well if HD is selected.
Cdroms work well in them too.

...
 though it's happy to boot anything off the HD. This
makes putting a 
'modern' OS (linux, in my case) on them a bit of a challenge. I've stuffed 
one full of ne2k, intel and 3com cards and use it as a firewall. 
I've run DOS, win3.1, Linux, Win95b, Nt4/server on these with 32m of ram.
Not super fast with a 486/66 as there is no external cache but remarkably 
solid.  Drives larger than 500mb must have a 500mb primary boot partition
but I have the NT4 system using a 4.3gb as NT4 fits easily in 500mb and 
handles the remaining partition after boot as "d:".

Allison