PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware
>   From: Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net>
>   Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 10:00:52 -0500
>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 09:25:29 -0400
>Allison <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>
>> 
>> A simpler way to beat the only one floppy problem.  Find a PCI
>> floppy/IDE card and disable the onboard controller.  Simple fix.
>> 
>> I used that fix at work to solve a problem mother board that lost all
>> floppy control due to lightining/power transient.  Since everything
>> else worked and I needed to get to other problem systems that was a
>> good fix.
>> 
>> Allison
>> 
>
>An even better 'fix' would be to disable just the floppy interface on
>the motherboard and use an ISA SCSI interface (i.e. a 1542) of the
>generation when there were versions with a floppy interface onboard
>(from systems that had NO 'AT Hard Disk Controler' hardware in them at
>all back in the era when '286 motherboards didn't have onboard disk
>I/O.)  In fact, I have at least one such a card here and should give
>that a try.  (added benefit would be having SCSI I/O in the system)

Is there are reading problem here?  From the second sentence:

 "and disable the onboard controller"

Was that clear enough?

I spent five years maintaining PCs (over 40 of them) for a small company
and I did a lot of hacking and fixing to keep old hardware going to not 
bust the budget.

I've taken the newest of the new and disabled the onboard (on mainboard)
functions to plug in better or prefered interfaces be they FDC, 
Sound of Video to avoid funky drivers or broken driver support.
Why is a simple FDC such a big deal?


Allison