4 floppy disk drives on a PC?

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Doc Shipley wrote:

> > I'd like to make a box with four floppy types: 5.25" 360 and 1.2, and
> > 3.5" 720 and 1.44.  I seem to recall someone here did this.
>
>    Unless you need to be able to have 2 disks of the same size active at
> the same time, you don't need four drives.
>
>    I have a 5.25/3.5" combo drive that handles all four of those formats
> (and 3.5" 360K) just fine.  The gorgeous part is that it occupies a
> single 5.25" bay.

I've got one of those installed already.  It's a Teac FD-505.  My, but
they're useful.  I have a stash of them.  Whenever I get in a PC that has
one I strip out the drive before heaving the rest.  What brand/model is
yours?

Sweet!  Dell has the documentation for these drives online:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/dta/37030/

The whole impetus behind this was that I was trying to read an old 360K
(might even be 320K or even 180K, I'm not sure) disk and while I could
read the directory, none of the files larger than say a cluster could be
read.  I attributed this to the drive not being a "true" 360K drive.

Fred seems to be the Guru with regards to floppy formats, and perhaps I
misinterpreted what I read, but I recall him bringing up a scenario in
which a disk formatted as 360K on a newer drive would not be readable on
an "actual" (i.e older) 360K drive, or the other way around, or something.

>    You have to be careful with the newer x86 motherboards, though - a
> lot of them will only configure a single floppy at the BIOS level.  I
> don't imagine that's a big deal in this crowd though.  ;)

I'm using an older 486 motherboard, and it works fine of course.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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