4 floppy disk drives on a PC?

From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com>
Date: Sun Jan 16 18:10:50 2005

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Doc Shipley wrote:

> > I'd like to make a box with four floppy types: 5.25" 360 and 1.2, and
> > 3.5" 720 and 1.44. I seem to recall someone here did this.
>
> Unless you need to be able to have 2 disks of the same size active at
> the same time, you don't need four drives.
>
> I have a 5.25/3.5" combo drive that handles all four of those formats
> (and 3.5" 360K) just fine. The gorgeous part is that it occupies a
> single 5.25" bay.

I've got one of those installed already. It's a Teac FD-505. My, but
they're useful. I have a stash of them. Whenever I get in a PC that has
one I strip out the drive before heaving the rest. What brand/model is
yours?

Sweet! Dell has the documentation for these drives online:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/dta/37030/

The whole impetus behind this was that I was trying to read an old 360K
(might even be 320K or even 180K, I'm not sure) disk and while I could
read the directory, none of the files larger than say a cluster could be
read. I attributed this to the drive not being a "true" 360K drive.

Fred seems to be the Guru with regards to floppy formats, and perhaps I
misinterpreted what I read, but I recall him bringing up a scenario in
which a disk formatted as 360K on a newer drive would not be readable on
an "actual" (i.e older) 360K drive, or the other way around, or something.

> You have to be careful with the newer x86 motherboards, though - a
> lot of them will only configure a single floppy at the BIOS level. I
> don't imagine that's a big deal in this crowd though. ;)

I'm using an older 486 motherboard, and it works fine of course.

-- 
Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Sun Jan 16 2005 - 18:10:50 GMT

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