PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/9/2005 at 12:47 PM Roger Merchberger wrote:

>
>However, I'll admit that it's a crapshoot... you'd want to make sure that 
>the mobo supports what you want to do. ;-) I'm also *not* going to say
>that 
>WindersXP will actually support it, as you *might* have to disable 
>Plug-N-Pray to get it to work.

Oddly, Winders XP just "might" support such a card, if the card has reasonable ACPI or PnP capabilities and it otherwise looks enough like a legacy floppy controller.  DMA is abstracted sufficiently in the NT kernel interface that the floppy code doesn't worry too much about what form it takes.  I don't believe that the generic NT floppy driver supports PIO access in lieu of DMA, however.

(I'm bundling XP/2000 under the heading of "NT" because there's not a whole lot of difference between the flavors at that level.  Remember that betas of 2000 were called "NT 5.0").

Where you'd have some problems would be with the VxD floppy support under Win9x.  But then, you should be able to force BIOS access by disabling or deleting the floppy port driver.

Where you'd have problems is with MS-DOS utilities that access the drives directly and expect to program an 8237 DMA controller.  Many such utilities have DMA 2/IRQ 6 hardwired.

Cheers,
Chuck