Drive inventory

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Thu Feb 14 14:03:33 2002

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Tothwolf wrote:
> > Run all other signals through to all drives, but run the drive select
> > lines through a switch to control which drive you want. Leave 14
> > disconnected (most drives and software expect the drive to be #0 or #1),
> > and get a 2P50T rotary switch?
> That would work well if all the tape drives that use the floppy interface
> followed the rules, but not all do. I guess it would be possible to build
> a board with some logic chips that could isolate individual drives from
> the bus, but I think it would be much easier for now to only connect one
> drive at a time.

Hmmm. I don't doubt that there were a lot of really weird ones, but
I wonder which rules they don't follow. My experience with floppy
controller run tape drives is limited to the 10 to 40 M stuff like the
Irwin and Archive, which were intended to coexist with floppy drives. I
was able to leave several connected to 286 machines on my DS switched
cables. (One of my 286's had 6 floppy drives and 2 tape drives on one
controller card)


(Some of my machines also had switches to disconnect the Index line for
easier reading of WD formats, and on one I had an inline switch module
with 34 slide switches - If you could find those, it would provide
maximum versatility)
Received on Thu Feb 14 2002 - 14:03:33 GMT