PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

Alexey Toptygin alexeyt at freeshell.org
Thu Oct 13 17:39:22 CDT 2005


On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Allison wrote:

> Another good choice is the 4" tall Dell Pizza boxes such as the 425/np
> though 466/np.  Theses are small, use PS2 connectors for keyboard
> and mouse and the board supports most floppies (x2), IDE disks to 500mb
> and S3 VGA video.   There is room enough to add a CDrom or 5.25 floppy.

I have 2 of these, and they're quite nice. You can run 25, 50, 33 and 60 
MHz chips in them with the right rejumpering (so my 425s are running 66Mhz 
now). Dell even had the motherboard docs online, last I checked. There's 
only one problem: the BIOS won't boot off any non-FAT formatted floppies, 
though it's happy to boot anything off the HD. This makes putting a 
'modern' OS (linux, in my case) on them a bit of a challenge. I've stuffed 
one full of ne2k, intel and 3com cards and use it as a firewall.

 			Alexey


More information about the cctalk mailing list