PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: PCs that support only one floppy drive in hardware
>   From: Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org>
>   Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:39:22 +0000 (UTC)
>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>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).  

I have done the same thing with 425s. all mine are DX/66.

>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, 

Mine do!  There is a bios selection for that.  The bios in these either 
boots the floppy or hard disk but doesn't switch well if HD is selected.
Cdroms work well in them too.

>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.

I've run DOS, win3.1, Linux, Win95b, Nt4/server on these with 32m of ram.
Not super fast with a 486/66 as there is no external cache but remarkably 
solid.  Drives larger than 500mb must have a 500mb primary boot partition
but I have the NT4 system using a 4.3gb as NT4 fits easily in 500mb and 
handles the remaining partition after boot as "d:".

Allison