Multiple floppies in one system?

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Thu Feb 28 00:59:30 2002

I've seen a couple of FDC boards that used both the primary and secondary
addresses in order to support 4 FDD's on two FDC's. I didn't consider them
terribly interesting back then, and don't suppose they're terribly important
now, except for the rare instance such as this.

Two FDC boards, even two IDE based multi-I/O boards with most of the I/O
disabled and the FDC's set for the two addresses would probably do just fine.
Of course you'd have to disable the FDC on the motherboard ...

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Russ Blakeman" <rhb57_at_vol.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 4:23 PM
Subject: RE: Multiple floppies in one system?


> JDR's own line of parts (forget the name) used to sell an ISA 4 floppy
> controller, they still might. Only machine (that I remember) that supported
> more than 2 floppies was my Sanyo MBC-555-2, went to 4 but then a hard drive
> defaulted to E:. Easy enough to get used to but the fact it had 4 floppies
> and with aftermarket DOS could go to 800k 5.25" format, I was able to run a
> Fido BBS system locally without a hard drive on it - Hacker's Anonymous out
> of UofI Champaign-Urbana, until they gave us an IBM AT with 2 20mb hard
> drives in the Theoretical Chemistry lab.
>
> => -----Original Message-----
> => From: owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org
> => [mailto:owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of David C. Jenner
> => Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 2:22 PM
> => To: Classic Computer Mailing List
> => Subject: Multiple floppies in one system?
> =>
> =>
> => I'm putting together an old 486 system, one of whose main
> => purposes will be to
> => read/write floppies of several formats. Like 5.25" 360K, 720K,
> => 1.2M, RX50, etc.,
> => and 3.5" 720K and 1.44M. I also want to be able to copy RX50s
> => disk to disk on
> => the appropriate drive type.
> =>
> => So I figure it'll take 4 drives (or maybe 3 drives where one is
> => a 3.5"/5.25"
> => combo). All of these would be in one enclosure.
> =>
> => The question is, how to do this without having to unplug/plug
> => drives every
> => time you want to make a configuration change? It would be nice
> => to just be
> => able to throw a switch or two to re-configure. Not having to
> => get into the
> => enclosure would be nice, too.
> =>
> => I've thought of two ways to do it, but I'm not sure they'll
> => work, or if there
> => might not be a better way.
> =>
> => 1) Plug all the drives into one control cable and switch on/off the power
> => to the drives to select them.
> => 2) Plug all the drives into one control cable and select the drives by
> => switching a control line on the control cable.
> =>
> => Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.
> =>
> => Thanks,
> => Dave
> => --
> => David C. Jenner
> => djenner_at_earthlink.net
>
>
Received on Thu Feb 28 2002 - 00:59:30 GMT