Semi-OT: Has any interfaced a 360K floppy to a pentium-class PC?

From: Patrick Finnegan <pat_at_purdueriots.com>
Date: Tue Aug 20 13:41:01 2002

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, DAVID L. ORMAND wrote:

> I got "refreshed" at work, and the new peecee (Compaq Evo) won't
> recognize my 360K. I NEED that 360K to transfer stuff to my
> TI-99/4A here. The BIOS doesn't appear to handle anything other
> than 1.44MB drives (A and B; why would you ever want two 1.44MB?).

Maybe for copying disks? But there's no reason to waste anything better
than a 286 on that...

> Is this just a stupid Compaq thing, or is it becoming common among
> BIOS and motherboard producers to drop support for older formats?

My nice ASUS dual-athlon board has options for other things, and also
works with a 360k drive. I've never seen anything myself that's a PC and
doesn't support 360k drives...

> I didn't think about using a peripheral card with a floppy
> controller; I've got a few kicking around in my "lab" at home. With
> my luck, this Evo won't have ISA slots, though. I'll bet there

Probably not... it's really hard to find a new computer with ISA slots
anymore.

> aren't any PCI cards with floppy controllers... But even if you

Not that I've seen. Any PC with PCI slots generally has a chipset that
has an onboard floppy controller.

> put a controller that can handle 5.25" drives, doesn't the BIOS
> still need to be set to 360K? If it isn't there, it isn't there,

Well, maybe. If the hardware (chipset) doesn't support the lower data
rate, you're probably out of luck. However, there are programs that will
read and write to disk (like TeleDisk for example) using I/O to the
controller. Anyways, if you can't disable the floppy controller in the
BIOS, you're not likely to get a replacement to work, anyways. The
onboard one will either 'compete' with the ISA card for I/O and
interrupts, or the ISA card won't even see the I/O to the port.

> seems to me. Pardon my peecee-ignorance, it is NOT my favorite
> platform.

VERY understandable. Good performance for the price. Bad quality (for
stuff that has the good price) and karma.

-- Pat
Received on Tue Aug 20 2002 - 13:41:01 BST