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 11:04:39 -0500
>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>> Gee I posted about doing just that.  If the machine has ISA there is
>> no need to mod the card.  Just disable (in bios) the mainboard level
>> FDC and plug in the ISA unit and go.
>> 
>
>But does that work without digging in further?  Does a PC/XT-era floppy
>card replicate a PC-AT diskette controller?  I am asking, since I've
>never tackled such a project.

It did for me.  Though I had one really old XT class card that was so 
crippled 1.44 3.5" was out of it's range. Most of the later smaller
ISA-8 cards were never a problem. 

>>   Also PCI cards work nice for that.
>> 
>
>I've never seen a PCI card that had a floppy interface on it.  I'm sure
>they exist.  Not in my junkbox, however, and I don't have the schematic
>diagram for them.

I must have a bigger junk box. I have two FDC/IDE (jumpers for disables)
and several FDC/IDE/Serial/parallel Combo cards for PCI.  They came out
of PCI machines that predated the everything_on_one boards.  JDRmicrodevices
still sells some of them.

Even if you can't (never ran into one) disable the on_main_board function
many of the older cards can be set up for secondary FDC, IDE and so on.
Then you may have to give up using the latest version of XP too.


Allison