3.5" floppy drive question(s)

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Saturday 11 October 2008 11:59, Phill Harvey-Smith wrote:
> There are a couple of problems however, most 1.44M drives are jumpered
> to operate as drive 1 only, and cannot easily be changed, this can be
> fixed however by swapping lines in the cable e.g. swapping 10 and 12
> will make the drive respond as drive 0.

Hence the twist in the cable...

> Also depending on your system, it may require a ready signal on Pin 34,
> most 1.44M drives supply disk change on this pin, however the couple of
> systems I have worked with that require this signal (Amstrad CPC,
> Spectrum +3), wiring the signal permenently to ground will do the trick.

I have somewhere several of those adapters that were suppled to convert the 
pin-type connectors common on 3.5" drives to the edge connector common on 
floppy cables supplied for earlier drives,  and some of these at least have a 
jumper on them that I would guess allows for selecting this.  At least I know 
that it does *something* with regard to pin 34 (Curtis,  let me know if you 
need one...  :-).

> Note some of the older 1.44s may have jumpers to change the ID, and
> enable ready. I have some Teac FD-235F drives that are like this (they
> have a bunch of jimpers just to the left of the steper motor),
> unfortunatly the HF that you have does not.

I am going to have to look through the floppy drives I have on hand and see 
which models they are and which might offer some flexibility and which 
don't.  :-)



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