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Author Topic: Can anyone identify this floppy drive?  (Read 2511 times)

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Offline RW222

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Re: Can anyone identify this floppy drive?
« on: October 09, 2007, 10:47:47 PM »
I've got a PC external drive somewhere that plugs into the PC parallel port. Mine's a RadioShack/Tandy model. Mine's a 5.25 and I picked up a bundle of 5.25 1.2MB media, and made a set of slackware install disks, thinking I could use it to put slack on a 486 lappy with a fried internal drive... I then realised, that slackware couldn't be persuaded to read the drive, doh, only had a dos driver for it. HDD was too small to load it up with images then install. Some of the smaller subnotebooks had hardware and BIOS support for a parallel port floppy. Some early 386 era ones had support for them as a B drive, at that time 1.44 was mostly confined to PS/2 machine and a lot of software came on 1.2MB (that period didn't last very long, if you blinked you missed it)

Anyhoo, could quite possibly be a PC drive. Though you'd expect in that case to see some buffers and a PC floppy controller chip in there somewhere.

There is a slight chance it's SCSI, but then it should have a jumper block or hex wheel switch on the back for the ID, unless it was hard set. Also it would likely have a z80 and a floppy controller chip inside. These were mostly used on VMS and Unix hardware.
RW222: A1200 (early commodore) A1220 Turbo+4MB, A500x2.
 

Offline RW222

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Re: Can anyone identify this floppy drive?
« Reply #1 on: October 10, 2007, 02:04:22 AM »
Another thought...

Once upon a time...

In a galaxy far, far away...

I used to have a 4 drive floppy and tape controller for an XT (8 bit) that had a high density onboard BIOS, and enough jumpers to shred the fingers of even a well practiced steel string guitarist. THAT had an external drive connector, but I don't remember now what the heck that looked like.

If it goes to a PC floppy controller though, the drive IDs should both be set to 1 and the cable twisted (to swap the ID lines and motor enable signals) ... another broken "standard".
RW222: A1200 (early commodore) A1220 Turbo+4MB, A500x2.