PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

[Scott Stevens]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 10:14:31 -0500
Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:

> On Sunday 09 October 2005 10:00, Scott Stevens wrote:
> > 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
> 
> This doesn't work well when you have a recent enough machine that it 
> doesn't have ISA slots.  Heck, I've got UNIX boxes from 1996 (getting 
> nearly on topic now) that have PCI but no ISA slots.
> 
Well, PCI was and is perceived as a 'good thing' and was never
PC-specific.  It's no surprise that UNIX vendors adopted PCI but never
touched ISA.  (didn't SGI have ISA, or maybe EISA slots, in some of
their workstations?)

I don't have any machines 'recent' enough that they don't have ISA
slots, for the record.  And, in fact, the particular Dell Optiplexes
that I continue to drone on about have a LOT of ISA slots if the
motherboard is installed in the mini-tower case.  More, even, than we
had available on a stock PC-AT once you tied up a bunch of the slots
with disk controller, video, network card, etc.