5-1/4" drive on modern PC

From: Jerome H. Fine <jhfinexgs2_at_compsys.to>
Date: Fri Dec 10 09:19:40 2004

>Pete Turnbull wrote:

> >--On Friday, December 10, 2004 07:40:53 -0500 Gene Ehrich
> <gehrich_at_tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there any way to attach and access a 5-1/4" diskette drive on a
>> modern day PC under either WIN98SE or XP PRO?
>
> Yes, just plug it in like a 3.5" drive. Assuming the drive has the
> appropriate jumper settings for a PC, it will work fine. XP Pro will
> even change the drive icon accordingly. I have 2 machines set up like
> that. If this is the machine's second drive, the only gotcha I can
> think of is that a small number of motherboards seem to only have one
> drive select, and hence can only support one drive (my Asus is like
> that -- I just disabled the on-board controller and used an old one).

Jerome Fine replies:

Under Windows 98 SE on a 750 MHz Pentium III, I installed
BOTH a 3.5" drive (A:) and a 5 1/4" drive (B:)

The ONLY real problem (aside from setting the jumpers and
using the correct cables, etc. was that at one point I
removed the 5 1/4" drive. When I attempted to add the
5 1/4" drive back to the configuration, I seem to remember
that it would NOT accept the second drive. Finally in
desperation, I removed the 3.5" drive as well, then added
back BOTH the 3.5" and 5 1/4" drives at the same time.
That seemed to solve the problem.

I use the 5 1/4" HD 1.2 MByte drive as an RX50 (sometimes
even as an RX33 with a change in the media - ask if there
are any questions) under E11 on the Pentium III so that
I can transfer small files (up to 400 KBytes) from/to a
PDP-11 with the real DEC RX50 drive. On the PC, PUTR from
John Wilson is also able to FORMAT (LLF) the RX50 media.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
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Received on Fri Dec 10 2004 - 09:19:40 GMT

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